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A VINDICATION 



OP 



JAMES HEPBURN 



FOUETH EARL OF BOTHWELL, 



THIED HUSBAND 



OP 



MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS. 



" KIEP TBEST " {Be Fn jtt/«f).— Bothwell's Motto. 

"Are these things so?" — The Acis,y\\.\. 

" Neither can they prove the things whereof they now accuse me." — The Acts, xxiv. 13. 

" With him his Fortune played as with a hall. 
She first has tossed him up, aud now she lets him fall." 

.Verses on Medalliou of Count Griffenfeld, Royal Library, Copenhagen. 



A^; 



3^" 



.^ BY 



J: watts de peyster, 

"ANCHOR." 



MAR £3 18tv 



PHILADELPHIA, PA.: 

L. R. HAMERSLY & CO., 

1510 Chestnut Street. 
188 2. 



^\V 



1/4757 



i 

JAMES HEPBURN, EARL OF BOTHWELL; 

THIRD HUSBAND OF MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS. 



" But who that Chief? — His name on every shore 
Is famed and fear'd — they ask, and know no more. 
With these he mingles not but to command ; 
Few are his words, but keen his eye and hand. 
Ne'er seasons he with mirth their jovial mess. 
But they forgive his silence for success. 
****** 

' Steer to that shore !' — they sail. ' Do this !' — 'tis done. 
' Now form and follow me !' — the spoil is won. 
Thus prompt his accents and his actions still. 
And all obey, and^few inquire his will. 
****** 

Yet they repine not, so that Conrad ^ guides ; 
And who dare question aught that he decides ? 

****** 

Still sways their souls with that commanding art 
That dazzles, leads, yet chills the vulgar heart. 
What is that spell that thus his lawless train 
Confess and envy, yet oppose in vain? 
What should it be that thus their faith can bind ? 
The power of Thought, — the magic of the Mind ! 
Linked with success, assumed and kept with skill, 
That moulds another's weakness to its will ; 
Wields with their hands, but, still to these unknown, 
Makes even their mightiest deeds appear his own. 
Such hath it been, shall be, beneath the sun, — 
The many still must labor for the one ! 
'Tis Nature's doom ; but let the wretch who toils 
Accuse not, hate not him who wears the spoils. 
Oh ! if he knew the weight of splendid chains. 
How light the balance of his humbler pains !" 

Byron's " Co7'sair," Iff ii., viii. 

^ Curious to say, this name or title of Bothwell was spelled in documents of 
the time in twenty-four different ways. 

2 Alphonse de Lamartine, in his " Marie Stuart," or " Eegina," says that By- 
ron predicated his poem, " The Corsair," on the maritime career of Bothwell, 
Lord High Admiral of Scotland, with whose wife. Lady Jane Gordon (divorced to 
enable the Earl to marry Mary Stuart), the poet was indirectly connected through 
his mother's ancestry. See letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot (first Earl of Minto, 1, 2, 
note and 24, note), said to be kin, by some line of descent, with John Elliot, of the 



2 JA3IES HEPBURN, 

There are few facits in history which are so startling as the general 
ignorance of the reading classes as to the real portraiture of some of the 
most remarkable characters who in so many cases have influenced na- 
tions, and in a few instances the world. These few resemble mountains 
like Ararat, which until within a few years have scarcely been explored 
at all, and have only been ascended by a small group of daring men. 
There are others, again, like Mount St. Elias, that loom up through cen- 
turies as that volcano is visible for an immense distance, yet has neither 
been climbed nor examined. In many respects the greatest man in 
history, w'ith the exception of St. Paul, was Hannibal, and yet how 
very, very little is known of him except through his enemies, whose 
instincts and interests compelled a misrepresentation of him. It is 
true that in his case his own language, not only as a living and a dead 
one, — i.e., in speech and writing, — and every exemplar of the Punic 
records, has perished from the face of the eartii. He wrote his name, 
however, in blood and desolation so indelibly that his victories and his 
stratagems are " Household Words." The })roverb " Hannibal ad 
portas" still signifies the presence of a terror imminent and dreadful. 
His wisdom, his virtues, how few are aware of them ! And yet in both 
he was as pre-eminent as in valor and victory. He was a victim of the 
" Irony of Fate" and of the vices and virulence of political faction. 
He was greatest when no longer victoriousf, and the expression " Han- 
nibal's Ring" signifies at once the refuge of despair and the ever-ready 
resource by which escape is only possible from the meanness and malice 
of triumphant enmity. Like the greatest Carthaginian, the greatest 
German, Frederick the Nonpareil, carried ever with him poison in a 
ring, determined not to survive the last humiliation. Hannibal was 
compelled to use it, Frederick was not. God willed it to be so. That is 
the only possible explanation. 

Another of the same unhappy class is Richard III. of England. 
His character is the synonym for all that is bad except cowardice. Is 
this the true verdict ? 

" No ! by St. Bride of Both well ! No 1" 

The exact reverse is most probably the fact. Whence, then, is the pop- 
ular and erroneous opinion derived? From Shakspeare's tragedy. 

Park, the celebrated Borderer or Outlaw, who claimed to be, if not the head of his 
name, at least the chief of a powerful branch of the Elliots, and by hereditary 
right Captain of Hermitage Castle, and who was killed in a personal encounter 
with Bothwell near Hermitage Castle, in Liddelsdale. 

Tills way of judging Bothwell from the nineteenth century standpoint of 
morality is ridiculous. He must be judged or gauged by his times. Some of the 
worthies of England were pirates, as he is falsely charged to have been, or, worse, 
abettors of piracy, sharing proceeds but not dangers. Hawkins, a great English 
admiral, was a kidnapper of negroes and father of the English-African slave-trade. 



EARL OF BOTHWELL. 3 

Was Shakspeare honest in his convictions ? There are many reasons 
to believe he was not. He was a courtier. His success depended on 
the favor of a circle of influential men, who themselves were neither 
more nor less than sycophants of a Queen whose favorite food was 
fulsome flattery. No extreme of that cloying sweetness was unpalata- 
ble. Richard III. was the head of the House of York, Elizabeth's 
grandfather of the House of Lancaster. Richard had been one of the 
most potent factors in the Wars of the Roses, which for twenty-four 
years drove forth the Lancasterian Line and occupied their throne. If 
Richard was the rightful monarch, Henry VII. was a rebel and a 
usurper, and Elizabeth, branded with bastardy by a party at home and 
a creed everywhere, was likewise not the legitimate tenant of her royal 
seat. Shakspeare did not dare to do Richard justice, and his genius, 
perverted in this instance to a cruel crime, painted his historical picture 
to please the woman who wielded the sceptre with more than ordinary 
masculine force. The great Marlborough stated that all that he knew 
of English history was derived from Shakspeare's plays. How many 
who would not admit this truth are nevertheless under the same mes- 
meric influence ? Physically Richard was not the deformity of popu- 
lar conception. In many respects he was handsome. His mental 
gifts have never been denied. His intelligence was very extraordinary. 
In every kind of courage he was a hero. What remains to be ex- 
amined? His morals. By what rule are they to be judged? His 
own dark era, or by the present of electric lights ? The writer has ex- 
amined several works which completely clear Richard from the crimes 
imputed to him. -As was said of Louis Philippe, years after he was 
driven forth, " France will yet inscribe him among her good kings." 
Had Richard conquered at Bosworth Field, there is little question but 
that instead of being condemned he would have been " crowned" — to 
use the word in the French sense in regard to a successful competitor 
in art, science, or general literature — by posterity. These preliminary 
remarks must serve as a preface to the subject of this article, James 
Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. The intention has been to lead up, step 
by step, the reader's attention to the consideration that follows. The 
Battle of Bosworth was fought 22d August, 1485. Just eighty-two 
years afterwards an engagement occurred in Scotland, at Carberry Hill, 
15th June, 1567, which was equally decisive of the ascendency of two 
men, James Hepburn, Earl of Botiiwell, and James Stuart, Earl of 
Murray. The former, the most manly, like Richard III., lost his 
cause, and, like the Yorkist scion also, has been handed down to pos- 
terity blackened and blasted by a fury of obloquy as entirely false as 
utterly undeserved in many respects. The latter, like Henry VII., 
was as cumrfng as a fox, ever " looking through his fingers" at evil 
deeds by which he expected to profit without exposing his fingers to 
the heat by which the chestnuts for his eating were being roasted. It 



4 JA3IE8 HEPBURN, 

was not until over three centuries had elapsed that Bothwell found a 
defender, one Dr. Petrick, who published in German (imprint, Berlin 
and St. Petersburg, 1874) a complete vindication of Bothwell, which, 
strange to say, agrees not only in idea and expression, but often in the 
very words with the views taken by the writer, as set forth in " A Study f 
Mary, Queen of Scots," published at New York in February, 1882. 
With the indefatigable research of a German critic, — in this respect un- 
excecded and seldom equaled by historical investigators in other coun- 
tries, — with an analysis of animus, argument, anecdote, allusion, and 
authorities worthy a chemist in search of arsenic in a corpse, and with 
the logic of an experienced lawyer. Dr. Petrick demolishes the corrupt 
testimony on which Bothwell has been condemned, and accumulates re- 
butting evidence on which he must be acquitted. If ever there was an 
ambitious, hypocritical, astute, and bold competitor for sovereign power, 
from which he was debarred by illegitimate birth, it was this Earl of 
Murray. Subservient to the clergy through policy, he found it the best 
investment of his life, and it served him not only while he lived, but 
has been equally precious to his memory. With their long black cloaks 
Knox and the preachers covered him, stained with political crimes, from 
the stigma of individual fraud, and calculated personal ingratitude to 
his forgiving sister. Queen Mary, and veiled the truth from the eyes of 
the people, and then threw their sanctimonious robes over his corpse, 
as a similar protection to his reputation, after he had been shot by 
Bothwellhaugh. 

Murray was the favorite of the clergy, who are evil cattle to pro- 
voke, and invaluable friends if cunningly cultivated. Charles Martel 
preserved France from Mahometanism, but taxed the priesthood for 
the benefit of the troops which enabled him to triumph, and the priests 
consigned the savior of Western Christendom to eternal fire, obloquy, 
and misrepresentation. The Puritans and their descendants wrote the 
history of the United States, and they arrogate to New England the 
origin of a greatness due far more to New York and Hollandish-Hu- 
gueuot influence. Even so it was with Bothwell. The parties he 
opposed in policy and in arms have furnished the particulars of his 
story. 

One of the recent German biographers of Mary remarks that 
the blacker Mary's champions succeed in painting Bothwell the 
whiter they hope thereby to make Mary appear; but here is a fit appli- 
cation of the motto selected by the Marquis de Nadaillac for his great 
work, " Les Premiers Hommes et les Temps prehistoriques," " Facta 
NON Verba," adding (ii. 463, (1) ), "Abuse is never argument, and it 
has always seemed to me that those who resort to abuse as a weapon do 
so because they have nothing more available." * 

And here let it be remarked, although in a measure out of place, 
but for emphasis, scarcely one who united in betraying Mary and 



EARL OF BOTHWELL. 5 

Bothwell but expiated their sins by tlie assassin's bullet, in brawl or 
battle, on the scaffold by the cord or axe, in the gloom of a cell or a 
dungeon, or some other unnatural end. 

Every human being is a product ! Mary was the natural result of 
ancestry, education, elevation, time, place, and circumstance. The same 
remarks apply to Bothwell. Mary was not a worse woman than her 
grandmother, her mother-in-law, her sister-in-law, nor the majority of 
the ladies by position in France and in Scotland. To judge her by 
public opinion to-day would be just as reasonable as to subject the 
Bishops in Scotland just prior to her accession to the same touchstone 
that would be applied to the private and public life of a prominent 
clergyman in the Middle States at present. Burton is almost stunning 
in his revelations of the morals of the spiritual as well as temporal 
aristocracy of Scotland at that time. He tells us (iii. 186) during the 
reign of James V., father of Mary, " A great tide of profligacy had 
then set in upon Scotland, and the clergy were the leaders in it." 
"Priests," said Garibaldi, "are [and have been, in many instances] 
the greatest scourges of mankind." True ! Aye ! 

"Some families (he adds, iii. 308-9) of the poorer landed gentry 
held in relation to churchmen a position that could not but subject them 
to humiliation. Their sisters or daughters were the known concubines 
of rich ecclesiastics, and held rank accordingly. For many of the clero-y 
who lived in concubinage, according to the letter of the law, there was 
doubtless the plea that morally they led a life of married domesticity. 
. . . Every man who practiced it was a law unto himself. There was 
no distinct sanction drawing, as the law of marriage draws, an obvious 
unmistakable line between domesticity and profligacy." 

"And of many of the great, rich churchmen, such as Cardinal Beaton 
and his successor, it was known that they did not profess these humble 
domestic views, or place themselves in the position of dissenters from 
the Church, by affecting the life of married persons. They flared their 
amours in the face of the world, as if proud of the excellence of their 
taste for beauty and the rank and birth that had become prostrate to 
their solicitations. It seemed as if their very greatness as temporal 
grandees enabled them to defy the ordinary laws of decorum, while 
their spiritual rank secured to them immunity from that clerical pun- 
ishment which it was their duty to pronounce against less gifted sinners." 

If professed moralists were to undertake to apply the elastic laws of 
Moses and the real interpretation of the Seventh Commandment to the 
lives of Scottish magnates, and contrast Bothwell with those who ouo-ht 
to have set an example, they would have to pronounce a merciful judg- 
ment on him. 

Mary Stuar! — to whom might be applied with more real justice than 
to the lady for whom they were originally intended the lines of Alfieri, 
addressed to his beloved Louisa, Countess of Albany : 



6 JAMES HEPBURN, 

" Bright are the dark locks of her braided hair, 
Grecian her brow, its silken eyebrows brown ; 
Her eyes — oh, lover, to describe forbear — 
Life can their glance impart, and death their frown ! 
Her mouth no rosebud, and no rose her cheek 
May emulate in freshness, fragrance, hue ; 
A voice so soft and sweet to hear her speak 
Inspires delight and pleasures ever new ; 
A smile to soothe all passions save despair; 
A slight and graceful form ; a neck of snow ; 
A soft white hand, and polished arm as fair; 
A foot whose traces Love delights to show ; 
And with these outward charms, which all adore, 
A mind and heart more pure and perfect given ; 
For thee thy lover can desire no more. 
Adorned by every grace and gift of Heaven." 

— Mary Stuart, the Fate of Bothwell, was a conscienceless flirt, but 
not altogether the bad woman that all but her devoted champions con- 
clude. She was a good wife to her first husband, Francis II. The 
very ardor of her love killed him. After his death she had fancies, 
guilty in some senses, but not criminal. It is very likely that in the 
early time of her widowhood she had a sneaking kindness for Bothwell. 
The French proverb, " To agree too well is sometimes dangerous," ap- 
plied to their case. Darnley, who made a trip to France in the wild 
hope of winning her, soon after Francis died, she would not look at. She 
preferred D'Amville, one of tiie noblest Frenchmen of the day, who was 
in love with her. He was married. It is insinuated that a suggestion 
was made to him that the obstacle of a wife might be easily removed. 
In spite of his passion he was a gallant gentleman, and tore himself 
away from the temptation. Chastelar and Gordon were fancies. Mary 
did not hesitate, as do most women of her kind, to sacrifice both to ex- 
pediency, the first as a sop to public opinion, suspicions in regard to 
herself, and the second to the momentary pressure of politics. " What 
a pity," cried Knox, "the de'il should ha'e his abode in sic' a piece of 
bonnie painted clay !" " Mary," quoth Laurie Todd, " was a deep, dis- 
sembling, polite woman." 

" Bathsheba's [Mary's] was an impulsive nature under a deliberative 
aspect. An Elizabeth in brain and a Mary Stuart in spirit, she often 
performed actions of the greatest temerity with a manner of extreme 
discretion. Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms ; unluckily 
they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assump- 
tions, but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently 
grew into deeds." The Duke d'Aumale, in his " History of the 
Cond^s," styles her justly the "Medusa of Beauties," — admirable, 
perfect comparison ; excellent. " Ada [Mary] is the magnetic mountain 
of the Fairy Tale : she attracts every one ; every one is wrecked, burned. 
She has nerves of steel and a heart of granite." 



EABL OF BOTHWELL. 7 

" How many of our special views and consequent acts, for instance, 
arose from the accident of birth, the opinions of those among whom we 
are educated, and so on." " Man's interference with nature" is never 
successful. " As is well known, Nature never corrects herself." " What 
a confused mixture of malice and feminine weakness" was Mary. "Let 
a woman's heart seem ever so cold, glacier flowers will ever be found on 
it." " In love great pleasures jostle great sorrows." "No man's soul 
is alone, — Laocoon or Tobit, — the serpent has it by the heart or the 
angel by the hand." "All the joints of his [Bothwell's or Mary's] 
life were torn, dislocated by these strong horses of Fate tied to his 
vitals and pulling in different ways." Darnley captured her in a 
moment of weakness, and her desire for him flashed up into flame as 
soon as she was caught, through the eye, by his physical graces and 
training. He was handfasted to her early in April, 1566, but not 
actually married until 29th of July following. Meanwhile they lived 
on the most intimate terms. After marriage her love was extinguished 
almost as suddenly as it had been enkindled, by his weakness and vile- 
ness. All this time there is a strange, sometimes strikingly evident, 
and at others almost imperceptible, thread, fine as silk, but strong as 
Fate, connecting her with Both well. When at length her passion for 
this " EEAL man" took possession of her, the long pent-up flood burst 
every barrier, and bore her away with it as helpless as an ice dam, 
which, between heat and freshet, is first crushed or broken down, then 
torn away, and finally borne off shattered and shattering by the raging 
stream. Every human being is a pr'oduct ! Not to trace cause and efiect 
beyond her grandparents, what was her grandfather, James IV. ? (Bur- 
ton, iii. 80-81.) "He was one who pleased the world and bought 
golden opinions from it, diverting censure from his failings, which were 
many and flagrant. He was a libertine, and that in a form which was 
likely to set the fashion in that direction, one of the direst mischiefs 
which a king can do to a people ; for, however self-willed they may 
be and disinclined to submission, a sovereign can always make himself 
the absolute lord of fashion. The same failings in his father were 
dealt with severely and scornfully, and a favorite mistress was bandied 
among the people by the contemptuous name of the ' Daisy.' This was 
the result of the sordid and unroyal ways of that king. The son's 
mistresses are seen in succession passing in splendor before an admiring 
people. At the beginning of his reign, while he is yet but a boy, his 
mistress, Lady Margaret Druramond, comes on the stage conspicuous in 
her grandeur, to become still more conspicuous in her fate ; for she and 
her sister died together at Drummond Castle, so suddenly and in such 
a manner as to convince all that poison had been at work." 

What was her grandmother, Margaret of Lancaster, worthy sister 
of Henry VIII. of England ? The marriage tie sat very lightly 
upon her. The story of her marriages and divorces, repeated and 



8 JAMES HEPBURN, 

glaring, have been too often related to need repetition here. One of 
her fancies, however, is seldom alluded to, and yet it must have been 
patent, because it is the subject of a picture reproduced in Pinkerton's 
" Scottish Gallery." It represents Margaret and the Duke of Albany, 
Regent of Scotland, together, and is supposed to have been painted in 
1522, when the connection became notorious, and her brother, Henry 
VIII., and Cardinal Wolsey loudly accused her of adultery. Between 
the faces a butterfly is painted, the indication of " an amour voltige" 
to which a guard or attendant behind the queen is pointing with his 
finger. This fine picture, probably painted in the north of England, 
is half satiric and political. Margaret's husband, Angus, was in the 
English interest ; Albany, her temporary lover, always in the French ; 
and thus it was some English artist gave vent to his feelings against 
the determined opponent of his country. James V. was certainly as 
loose in his morals as his father and his mother. Burton says " He 
would, according to modern notions, be called a profligate." He left 
behind him six illegitimatechildren, amply endowed and highly placed, 
besides a number not acknowledged. The best known of those six was 
James Stuart, at first Prior of St. Andrew's, then Earl of Murray, and 
finally Regent of Scotland. Very extensive reading discovers no direct 
charge against Mary of Guise, Mary's mother, but she was of the 
house of Lorraine, in whose veins, prince or prelate, the blood flowed 
fiercely and furiously. Somewhere it is hinted that she stood in a pecu- 
liar relation to the magnificent Cardinal Beaton, and undoubtedly she 
did considerable flirting with Bothwell's father, if not more. These 
were the times and manners that justified such verses as Scott's, in his 
" Bridals of Triermain," Canto II., 1 XVIII,— 

" And still these lovers' fame survives, 
For faith so constant shown : 
There were two who loved their neighbors' wives, 
And one who loved his own." 

To this the author adds as a note an extract from Ascham's " School- 
master," written about the time of Mary's birth : " In our forefathers' 
tyme, when Papistrie, as a standyug poole, covered and overflowed all 
England, fewe books were read in our tongue, savying certaine bookes 
of chevalrie, as they said, for pastime and pleasure ; which, as some 
say, were made in the monasteries by idle monks or wanton chanons. 
As one, for example, ' La Morte d'Arthure ;' the whole pleasure of 
which book standeth in two speciale ])oynts — in open manslaughter and 
bold bawdrye; in which booke they be counted the noblest knightes 
that do kill most men without any quarrell, and commit fowlest adoul- 
teries by sutlest shiftes ; as Sir Launcelot, with the wife of King 
Arthur, his master ; Sir Triestram with the wife of King Marke, his 
uncle ; Sir Lameracke, with the wife of King Lote ; that was his own 



EARL OF BOTHWELL. 9 

aunt. This is good stuffe for wise men to laugh at, or honest men to 
take pleasure at, yet I know when God's Bible was banished the court, 
and La Morte d'Artluire received into the prince's chamber." 

Murray^ was not a profligate like his father and mother. He was 
too cold and calculating a mortal to risk the moral support of the 
reformers and staid middle classes by open indulgence in illicit pleas- 
ures. Can his greatest admirers deny, however, that he was blind to 
every kind of profligacy in those whose support he sought or continued 
to be 'necessary to him after it was acquired? He was too astute to 
commit crimes. He winked at them, and his winks were often equiva- 
lent to State warrants ; sometimes to kill reputations, at others to hale 
into prison or drive forth into exile, or even to lead to execution. " He 
looked through his fingers" at the murder of Rizzio, at the assassination 
of Darnley ; at the incarceration of his sister Mary. He always slunk 
away when a bad deed was doing and done ; he always turned up 
most opportunely when the benefits of it were to be secured. He 
always turned at a crisis 

" To Morton, steeped in lust and guilt, 
My old accomplice he." 

Morton, his particular associate, in some respects his alter ego, was a 
cold-blooded profligate. Rich or poor, gentle or plebeian, if he saw a 
woman that pleased him, he rarely failed to possess himself of her. 
Among a nobility whose almost only redeeming quality was personal 
bravery, to whom oath% were trifles as light as air, associations, 
" bonds," or " bands" blanks after signature or the subscribers' pur- 
poses were attained, honor a by-word, truth a jest, conscience an un- 
known quantity, Both well, if he was comparatively pure and honest, as 
he is known to have been, among such creatures, black as sin could make 
them, he must have appeared like a white crow. That he was "a real 

^ " At the head [of the Lords of the Congregation, Protestant nobility] was 
Lord James Stuart, Prior of St. Andrew's, better known as the Earl of Murray, a 
bastard brother of the queen, formidable alike from his ability and his ambition. 
He was the natural son of James V. by Margaret, daughter of Lord Erskine, and 
is believed, from an early period of his life, to have entertained the hope of obtain- 
ing a reversal of his illegitimacy, in which case he might, in the event of Mary 
dying without issue, have advanced a claim to the crown of Scotland. Nor was 
this a scheme so wild as to appear beyond the pale of probability. The claims of 
Henry VII. to the throne of England had been rested upon no better foundation, 
and Elizabeth's right . . . was worse than doubtful Murray was just the kind of 
man likely to succeed in such a design. He was cool, cautious, long-sighted, and 
unscrupulous ; and by taking the popular side in the then all-absorbing religious 
cohtroversy he greatly increased his reputation and his power. He also entered 
into deep and intricate relations with the Court of England. 

" Murray has by more than one writer been represented as a high-minded and 
patriotic man. Before Elizabeth he was no better than a spaniel, cowering under the 
degradation of the lash, which was often unsparingly applied." — Aytoun's "Both- 
well," 197, 202-3. 

2 



10 JA3IES HEPBURN, 

man" (" loahre Mann'') as Petrick styles him, loyal, patriotic, able, 
faithful to his trusts, brave as his sword, in such au evil time and gen- 
eration, is sufficient to excuse a love of wassail which he never allowed 
to overcome his senses, of women whom he never permitted to inter- 
fere with duty, or a wrath which in most instances was not only just 
in its object but justified in its means. Hosack, who championed 
Mary with the zeal of a knight and the professional ardor and ability 
of a practiced lawyer, who is no friend to Bothwell, is nevertheless com- 
pelled to concede to him characteristics which make him loom up like 
a " real man" and a true Scotchman, even as Pompey's Pillar towers 
above the Arab huts and the ruins and desolation that surround it. 

Mary wrote, after her marriage, to the French court that " among 
her Scotch nobility she had not found one who could enter into a com- 
parison with the Earl of Bothwell, either in the elevation [rejmtation) 
of his house or lineage, his own personal merits, his wisdom, his valor, 
and that she had yielded with the utmost willingness to the desire of 
the ' Three Estates' in espousing him." TWs is as grand and sufficient 
as a more recent letter of a noble lady to her knight under somewhat 
similar circumstances : " Of late you have filled me with so much con- 
fidence that I venture to give you some of my thoughts. My heart is 
overflowing with love. First, I admire 'you for your brains, — I think 
you have a brilliant mind ; secondly, you are a gentle gentleman, and 
know how to please and treat a lady ; thirdly, you are a person one 
could lean on and feel secure. But above all you have much good in 
you. I believe you love me and that you are true to me." Here we 
have almost identically the same sentiment that Mary expressed in her 
portraiture of Bothwell. If history often repeats itself, love inva- 
riably does. 

Nor does even John Hosack, Mary's advocate (i. 155), fall short of 
this testimony. " Bothwell was the only one of the great nobles of Scot- 
land who from first to last had remained faithful both to her [Mary's] 
mother and herself. . . . Whatever may have been his follies or his 
crimes, no man could say that James Hepburn was either a hypocrite or 
a traitor. Tiiough staunch to the religion which he professed, he never 
made it the cloak for his ambition; though driven into exile and reduced 
to extreme poverty by the malice of his enemies, he never, so far as we 
know, accepted of a foreign bribe. [All the others were for sale or 
bought.] In an age when political fidelity was the rarest of virtues, 
we need not be surprised that his sovereign at this time trusted and re- 
warded him, . . . Although the common people admired his liberality 
and courage [his characteristic daring, i. 158] Bothwell among Ijis 
brother nobles had no friends." Why ? They envied his gifts and they 
envied his influence with the Queen. Need any man ask a higher 
eulogy than this? 

And yet amid all this brutality in manners and mode of living 



EARL OF BOTHWELL. 11 

there are glimpses of the influence of gentler natures, which are the 
more striking from their contrast to the general tone of thought. Wit- 
ness the following love-letter of Perkin Warbeck to his betrothed, Lady 
Catharine Gordon, in 1492, the very year in which Columbus dis- 
covered America. It is worthy of any person or any period : 

" Most noble lady, it is not without reason that all turn their eyes to you ; that 
all admire, love, and obey you. For they see your twofold virtues by which you 
are so much distinguished above all other mortals. Whilst, on the one hand, they 
admire your riches and immutable prosperity, which secure to you the nobility of 
your lineage and the loftiness of your rank, they are, on the other hand, struck by 
your rather divine than human beauty, and believe that you are not born in our 
days but descended from heaven. 

" All look at your face, so bright and serene that it gives splendor to the cloudy 
sky ; all look at your eyes, as brilliant as stars, which make all pain to be forgotten 
and turn despair into delight; all look at your neck, which outshines pearls; all 
look at your fine forehead, your purple light of youth, your fair hair, in one word, 
at the splendid perfection of your person ; and looking at, they cannot choose but 
admire you ; admiring, they cannot choose but love you ; loving, they cannot choose 
but obey you. 

" I shall, perhaps, be the happiest of all your admirers and the happiest man 
on earth, since I have reason to hope you will think me worthy of your love. If I 
represent to my mind all your perfections, I am not only compelled to love, to adore, 
and to worship you, but love makes me your slave. Whether waking or sleeping, 
I cannot find rest or happiness except in your aflfection. All my hopes rest in you, 
and in you alone. 

" Most noble lady, my soul, look mercifully down upon me, your slave, who 
has ever been devoted to you from the first hour he saw you. Love is not an earthly 
thing; it is heaven-born. Uo not think it below yourself to obey love's dictates. 
Not only kings but also gods and goddesses have bent their necks beneath its yoke. 

" I beseech you, most noble lady, to accept forever one who in all things will 
cheerfully do your will as long as his days shall last. Farewell, my soul and my 
consolation. You, the brightest ornament of Scotland, farewell, farewell." 

Among those who read at all the minority is very small who have 
not heard or read of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Of the majority 
who know something of or sympathize with her, few recall anything 
of Bothwell but his association with the murder* of her miserably 
vile, hobbledehoy husband, Darnley, and yet how justly does Burton 

* Of these — [the " Bond" against Darnley] — Bothwell was the most formida- 
ble. Without any pretence to personal religion, he was nominally a Protestant, 
and therefore not obnoxious to the people on the score of Popery. Since his recall 
from France he had done good service to the Queen, and had risen high in her 
favor. He was Warden of the Three Marches, Lord High Admiral of Scotland, 
and General of the land forces ; and his connections were extensive and powerful. 
He was held in great dislike by the emissaries of Elizabeth, who had ever found 
him incorruptible; and he was regarded by the conspirators as the formidable 
enemy of their faction. But with all this he was a profligate man, of a daring and 
ambitious spirit, unrestrained by real principle, and ready to go at any lengths for 
the gratification of his own desires. He was also exorbitantly vain ; and the pref- 
erence which was shown him by the Queen, on account of his undoubted services, 
appears to have awakened hopes which possibly at an earlier period he had con- 
ceived." — Aytonn's ^'■Bothwell," 212-13. 



12 JAMES HEPBURN, 

observe (iv. 273) : " With all her beauty and wit, her political ability 
and her countless fascinations, Mary, Queen of Scots, would not have 
occupied nearly tlie half of her present place in the interest of man- 
kind had the episode of Bothwell not belonged to her story." 

The misrepresentations in regard to Bothwell's personal appearance 
are not more opposite than those in regard to his qualifications and 
characteristics. Many people might regard this as extremely strange 
and unaccountable. It is not within a century that Western Europe 
beheld the apparition of Russia's greatest general. Scarcely any two 
accounts agree in regard to him, except as to the results that followed 
his appearance on the different theatres of war. The writer has in his 
possession works presenting portraits, physical and mental, totally irrec- 
oncilable. If Lord Minto, who came in contact intimately with him 
in Vienna, is correct, all the other accounts to his advantage are mis- 
erable flatteries. The writer believes that he was a hero, a genius, but 
at the same time an eccentric, to such a degree that very often his 
eccentricity verged on madness, presenting the living exemplification 
of Dry den's famous lines, — 

" Great wits are sure to madness near allied, 
And thin partitions do their bounds divide." 

Or, as Pope phrases it, — 

" What thin partitions sense from thought divide." 

About the very time that Suwarrow had risen to distinction, the 
great New York loyalist. Sir John Johnson, was making himself known 
and felt. The controversies about Suwarrow's physique and character 
are about as divergent as the opinions in regard to Sir John held by 
the Whigs or rebels and the Tories or loyalists. How hard he struck 
is not susceptible of question, but whether from principle or from ven- 
geance the judgment of men is as wide apart as the poles. History is 
just as fallible as to the majority of the men who have influenced human, 
progress, as Froude (ix. 321) justly remarks in regard to the Duke of 
Alva: "The exterminators of the Canaauites are enshrined among the 
saints, and had the [Roman] Catholics come ofi' victorious [in the 
Netherlands], the Duke of Alva would have been a second Joshua." 

Hough, in his "Northern Invasion" of this State in 1780, has a note 
on this subject, which applies to every similar case. The gist of it is 
this : The opinions of local populations in regard to prominent men 
were entirely biased, if not founded upon their popularity or the re- 
verse. If modern times were to judge of the character of Hannibal 
by the pictures handed down by the gravest of Roman historians, he 
would have to be regarded as a man destitute of almost every redeem- 
ing trait except courage and ability or astuteness ; whereas, when the 



EARL OF BOTHWELL. 13 

truth is sifted out, it is positively certain that the very vices attributed 
to the great Carthaginian should be transferred to his Latin adver- 
saries. 

These remarks are most apposite to the case of Bothwell. The 
great historical Scottish authority of the period of Mary is Buchanan. 
Burton, tlie recent exhaustive historian of Scotland (iii. 101, 102 (3), 
observes: "Great part of his history is fabulous, and when he comes to 
the controversies in which he took part he was too strong a partisan 
to be impartial." When it suited his purpose he was a sycophant; 
when it was to his interest he was a shameless liar. He speaks of 
Bothwell as looking like an ape in magnificent attire, which leads 
honest Burton to remark that this " is no more to be taken as accu- 
rate than any other scolding objurgation." 

All the misrepresentations of Bothwell were in the same spirit as 
Hogarth's conceptions of Frenchmen, or as the caricatures of Bonaparte 
during England's fiercest antagonism to her most bitter enemy. Flat- 
tery painted the portraits of Mary ; envy, hatred, jealousy, and vindic- 
tiveness those of Bothwell. 

" It is difficult," observes Gibbon (ii. 130), "to form a just idea of 
his [Clodius Albinus'] true character. Under the philosophic cloak 
of austerity, he stands accused of concealing most of the vices which 
degrade human nature. But his accusers are those venal loriters [as 
Shakspeare in regard to Richard III,, in favor of Henry VII., grand- 
father of Elizabeth] who adored the fortune of Severus, and trampled 
on the ashes of an unsuccessful rival." 

Brantome is equally abusive. Burton again meets this with the 
commentary that Brantdme may have met Bothwell, but his language 
implies that he had not. There is proof positive and corroborative that 
both the Scottish narrator and the French chronicler have falsified the 
truth. In the first place we have the direct testimony of Gilbert Stuart, 
who was a passionate partisan, " one of the most zealous advocates" of 
Mary. He paints anything but a disagreeable pen-portrait. " He [Both- 
well] was in the prime of youth and extremely handsome." This was 
when Mary first favored him. Throckmorton, the English envoy, who 
is no friend to the earl, reported of him, " He is a glorious, rash, and 
hazardous young man." He writes in Latin, and Bothwell's enemies 
insinuate that he meant by gloriosus something derogatory. Out upon 
such casuistry ! The primal definition of the word is glorious, re- 
nowned. According to Littleton it means illustrious, — iUustris, mag- 
nificus, prcepotens, pr^clarus. Cicero uses it in the best sense. 

Amid all the obloquy that has been heaped upon the mighty Earl, 
the fact remains unshakable that he was a power that " overtojiped" the 
powerful around him. He was acclimated to broil and battle ; as Saul 
said of Goliath, " he [had been] a man of war from his youth," nay, 
boyhood, for he had " worn steel since he was twelve years old." 



14 JAMES HEPBURN, 

He could " drain a deeper cup, back a wilder horse, ride it like a 
whirlwind, and couch a heavier spear than the rudest of his jackmen" 
(Borderers or Moss-troopers) ; possessed a fine stalwart {)erson, divested 
of superfluous flesh, " built more like a tower than a man," great 
strength and militaiy bearing, exercising a fascination over his savage 
hereditary liegemen that won while it controlled them. His features 
were manly, bronzed by exposure to the changing vicissitudes of his 
rouffh native climate, and his determined mouth was concealed be- 
neath long, drooping moustachios that mingled with his fair curling 
beard. No wonder that Mary looked u})on him with favor, for she 
had agreeable recollections of his respectful homage when she first wore 
the white robes of queenly widowhood ; and after she returned to Scot- 
land she still found his loyalty so lofty and unchangeable that "it 
seemed to partake of that devotion which shed a halo over the days of 
chivalry." 

One of the epithets hurled at him by those who hated and feared 
him is the stigma that he was " one-eyed." But the same designation 
is applicable to Hannibal, perhaps the greatest individual not a king 
who ever trod the earth, and to Potemkin, the mighty Russian Poten- 
tate, who never lost the heart of the Empress Catherine II., nor his 
control of herself and her empire. If, however, the Earl had lost 
the sight of an eye in combat, by sea or land, the orb itself was unin- 
jured, and it has been observed that the scar on his forehead, which 
was the only visible vestige of the injury, " became his face as it would 
have become none other." Men are not always disfigured by such 
casualties ; and it is well known that Marie Louise, daughter of im- 
perial Austria, willingly exchanged the embraces of the Emperor Na- 
poleon for those of Count Niepper, an extraordinarily handsome 
Austrian officer, although he had actually lost an eye in battle and wore 
a pat(!h or bandage. 

Bothwell, like Mary, was entirely out of the common. His appear- 
ance was no index to his age. He was one of those so completely im- 
bued with vitality that years j)ass over them and leave none of the 
traces which stamp, season after season, their impress on ordinary men, 
or scar them deeply, as the glaciers furrow the rocks over which they 
glide, grinding on age by age, leaving channels that remain indelible 
after the superincumbent ice has melted away. There may have been 
silver mingled with his darker locks, but this was not the result of time 
but of thought, just as in the days of plate-armor a soldier could be 
recognized by fringes of gray where the helmet had pressed most closely 
and persistently, while everywhere else the original color held its own. 
He was a curious commingling of the self-possession that results from 
deep thought and severe discipline of mind and body in war, politics, 
and courts and the mobility which is inseparable from an original 
nervous temperament while as yet the frame has not known sufficient 



EARL OF BOTHWELL. 15 

rest to take on superfluous flesh. If Michael Angelo's Penseroso — 
Guiliano, not Lorenzo de Medici — could have been transmitted from 
bronze into flesh, effigy would have lived in such a man as Bothwell. 

It is as difficult to decide what constitutes the handsome in man as 
in woman. Figure has as much to do with it as face, but whenever the 
latter indicates mind and manliness and is susceptible of illumination 
from within it cannot be otherwise than handsome. It matters not the 
color of the eye for effect, in the excitement of passion the light eye 
often becomes dark, and there are hazel eyes which when they scin- 
tillate or burn, have no color, they are simply living fires, — diamonds 
of the clearest and intensest lustre. 

Contemporaries attributed the domination exercised by Bothwell 
over Mary to necromancy ; but the best answer to such a charge is that 
made by the unfortunate Leonora Galigai, — daughter of the nurse of 
Mary de Medicis, and widow of the assassinated Concino Concini, 
Marshal d'Ancre, — when accused of similar powers over the Floren- 
tine queen of Henry IV. of France. She replied, " My arts were 
simply the superiority of a strong mind over a weak one." As re- 
garded Bothwell Mary Stuart was weak, however strong in other cases. 
While so many writers have sought to degrade and even to caricature 
Bothwell, there are some who seek to do him justice without the slight- 
est sacrifice of truth. 

Bothwell was a gentleman of ancient race. He had the manners 
of a great lord, and the haughtiness of a feudal noble. His resolute 
features never blushed. His eyes were beautiful, although one had 
been deprived of vision ; but he was far from being disfigured by the 
accident. Indeed, the defect of his sight was hardly perceptible. His 
voice, which had a genuine manly ring, ^as susceptible of the gentlest 
inflections. His mouth expressed his feeling of superiority. He had 
a marked nose and a patrician physiognomy, and his fascinating look 
resembled that of an eagle. This martial visage, this noble and easy 
figure, this soul without scruples, this mind full of audacity and am- 
bition, carried the queen away. To this must be added the attest of 
Sir Walter Scott as to " the bold address and courtly manners of Both- 
well," " a nobleman possessed of his great power and hereditary 
influence." 

" All these [his] ' gifts of hell' were relieved by a lofty demeanor 
and by an air that seemed to defy fortune, danger, and adversity." 
Alas ! Whence came " these gifts of Hell ?" In all things Bothwell 
was more sinned against than sinning, according to the touchstone of 
humanity and the measuring-rod of his times. It is said that Both- 
well was in love with Mary from the first moment that he beheld his 
"Heine Blanche'' in the Park of Fontainebleau, as early as 1560, and 
that he welcomed her home with a loyalty as pure as his devotion was 
strong. His captivity in Edinburgh Castle by the warrant of Mary, 



16 JA3IES HEPBURN, 

to gratify Murray and his party, is said to have changed the wliole 
nature of Bothwell. He felt that he had suffered a grievous injustice 
from one to whom he had given heart and hand, or, rather, brand ; and 
after his release he brooded over the wrong until his naturally violent 
temi)er overcame all gentler restraints. His temper had hitherto re- 
sembled a mountain lake, confined within bounds by artificial barriers. 
Thus dyked it fed a swift and ever-beneficent stream, but as soon as 
storm and flood had breached the bulwark it poured forth a wild and 
unrestrainable torrent that wasted where it had formerly blessed. Mary 
was Scotch stock, developed by French cultivation ; Bothwell, a Scotch- 
barbaric-aristocratic scion, refined by French influence and association. 
Both were congenial in origin and identical in seed. Like was drawn 
to like ; tliey mutually attracted each other. Bothwell was brave to a 
degree sufficient to encounter any peril. Still, it is true that, while he 
possessed the physical courage which triumphs triumphantly and suc- 
cumbs without yielding, his end did not manifest the purest, the high- 
est moral intrepidity inspired by fanaticism or love. If he had 
possessed either of these grander forms of courage he could not have 
been induced to abandon the field at Carberry Hill without one desperate 
blow stricken for the trusting woman who loved him so intensely as to 
sacrifice everything for him. Nor would he have lingered out so many 
years in captivity. The real bird of prey would have beaten out its 
life against the bars of its prison, or soon would have drooped and died 
in captivity. . . . 

What is the reality of the pen-portrait of Bothwell, drawn and 
colored by the enmity of Murray's panegyric? Bothwell was hand- 
some, smart, alluring, fearless, utterly free from the superstitions and 
fanaticism of his era ; ambitious, a lay Richelieu, who, when he saw 
his objective, reached it by clearing away obstacles. He was not as 
politic or self-restrained as Moray, or Murray, but he was far more 
trustworthy. In every respect he was as far superior to the avaricious 
and dissolute Morton, to the unprincipled Huntley, and to the com- 
bined or simj)le vices inherent in the rest of the prominent Scottish 
nobility as he may have failed in the feigned decorum of the regent, 
in whom the shrewd instincts of the fox were in complete ascendency 
over those of the wolf. For his generation Bothwell was not as bad 
as many men whose opportunities for evil were not in accordance with 
their vile desires. Not to be absolutely vicious where the many, — with 
rare exceptions, — were altogether so, entitles him to a consideration and 
a fair judgment which is inconsistent with the influences of to-day. 
Circumstances alone make men, and men must be judged by the cir- 
cumstances which environed and mastered them. Many a man and 
many a woman who pass for saints in the nineteenth century might 
have been very devils had they lived in Scotland or in France three 
hundred and twenty-five years ago. 



EARL OF BOTHWELL. 17 

Bothwell's religious convictions were directly opposite to those of 
Mary. He was a Protestant. Such a combination of principle and 
the want of it in a man stigmatized by his enemies as very wicked may 
be a seeming paradox, but it is not unexampled. Many a ,man who 
appears to-be destitute of principle possesses, nevertheless, underlying 
everything, a determination in regard to doctrine which is inaccessible 
to force, to bribe, or to seduction, — a bed-rock belief which defies fire 
itself. Everything seemed calculated to separate the bigoted Papist, 
Mary, and the unyielding Presbyterian, Bothwell. It appeared, how- 
ever, as if even the vices of so strange a lover, their mutual diver- 
gences, united to make him irresistible in the heart of the queen, cor- 
rupted in its first developing bud in the flagitious Court of the Valois, 
in which the presiding Circe was Catherine de Medicis, surrounded 
by her one hundred and fifty jilles d^honneur {sic), the sirens of her 
Italian policy. Mary and Bothwell were physical, moral, and mental 
enigmas while living, and they ar-e still enigmas. 

Scarcely three months elapsed after the murder of Darnley before 
Mary was remarried to Bothwell, and the funeral baked meats 

" Did coldly furnish foi'th the marriage table," 

not merely poetically. This may seem horrible, and, indeed, it would 
be so under ordinary circumstances. And yet the apparently inex- 
plicable may be made comj)reliensible by a careful consideration of the 
occurrences. The life of Mary hitherto had been rather one of posi- 
tive suffering than of relative happiness. The miserably sickly husband 
of her youth and superb blossoming had died after nineteen months of 
a prolonged exhaustive honeymoon, throughout which the wife had 
been little better than a nurse or governess. The interval between the 
death of Francis and the espousal with Darnley was certainly one of 
trial of heart, mind, and even body. Mary expected to find in her 
again young husband a solace and a support. He proved to be neither. 
His youthful vigor, his fine person, and good looks were masks that 
concealed a vile disposition and an insane ambition ; and his efforts to 
obtain the crown-matrimonial, with an authority equal, if not superior, 
to that of Mary, were characterized by exhibitions and efforts that 
prove him to have been devoid of any manliness, and of every other 
quality which might have measurably redeemed his base ingratitude 
and his w^ant of intelligence. He assassinated the queen's affection for 
him, aroused and stimulated by his outside attractions, almost as sud- 
denly by not only planning but assisting in the dastardly murder of 
the unhappy Rizzio. Mary, who to feminine graces united masculine 
cour'age and energy, saw in Bothwell the qualities which constitute a 
" REAL MAN." He had befriended her, sustained her, championed 

3 



18 JAMES HEPBURN, 

her ; he was fearless, devoted ; in short, a rough but resolute Scottish 
lord, and also a bold Scottish man, far better and in no wise worse 
than his peers in rank, — yes, better than all in one quality or another, 
even than Murray. Mary's best affections had been crushed in upon 
herself by the adverse circumstances of her position and the mean- 
nesses of her husband. Tliey had been chilled by an utter absence of 
the sympathy, in all around her save in Bothwell, which she so greatly 
needed, — a sympathy necessary to bring out and develop all that was 
loving and lovable in her nature. When freed from such a mate as 
Darnley, her affections, suddenly relieved from the terrible pressure of 
the ties that bound her, her very capability of feeling, stretched itself 
out, as a vine planted in the darkness of a vault grows towards the crev- 
ices through which filters a single ray of light; and then, when her 
arms thus expanded to the warmth and comfort and confidence of a 
new hope, a new faith, a new love, when her arms and hands, out- 
stretched beseechingly, met each other again in a fond embrace, — those 
beautiful, soft, white, rounded arms, and the hands that betrayed her 
at Lochleven Castle, — they enclosed — Bothwell ! 

Or when, crushed in her affections and her spirits, she opened wide 
her arms for sympathy, support, and love, and the expanded fingers, 
which were symmetry itself, drew together and clasped each other 
again about the columnar support she so greatly needed, and for which 
she yearned, they locked within the magic circle of that yearning quest 
the hero of her dreams, the stalwart Bothwell ! 

So far for actual proof as to the traits and attractiveness of Both- 
well. Now as to the corroborative evidence. When, in 1562, through 
the temporary ascendency and enmity of Murray, Bothwell fled to 
France, the king, Charles IX., appointed him one of his chamberlains. 
The House of Valois liked to have handsome men and women around 
them. Is it likely that Charles IX. would have selected a foreigner 
repulsively ugly, without grace and accomplishments, to be near his 
person ? The supposition is supremely ridiculous, and this fact alone 
gives the lie both to Buchanan and Brantome. When, again, in 1563, 
the malice of his enemies drove Bothwell forth he again repaired to 
the Court of France, and Charles IX. made him Commander of his 
Scots Guard, to whom was intrusted the protection of his person. In 
the " Scot Abroad" Burton discourses as follows : 

"The Scots Guard consisted of one hundred ^rens d'armes and two hundred 
archers. They had a Captain who was a High Officer of State. The first Captain 
of the Guard who appears in history — and probably the first person who held the 
office — was John Stewart, Lord of Aubigne, the founder of a great Scots House in 
France. ... By a chivalrous courtesy the appointment to this high office was con- 
fided to the King of Scots. This was an arrangement, however, that could not last. 
As the two nations changed their relative positions, and the Guard began to become 



EARL OF BOTHWELL. 19 

Scots only in name, it became not only out of the question that the captain should 
be appointed by a foreign government, but impolitic that he should be a foreigner. 
It is curious to notice a small ingenious policy to avoid offense to the haughty for- 
eigners in the removal of the command from the Scots. The first Captain of the 
Guard who was a native Frenchman was the Count of Montgomery, who, for his 
patrimonial name, which corresponded with that of an old Scots family, passed for 
a man of Scots descent. It was thought prudent that his son should succeed him ; 
but the selection was not fortunate, for he was the same Montgomery who hit [and 
mortally wounded] King Henry II. at the jousts in honor of his daughter Eliza- 
beth's marriage to Philip II., and so made Mary Stewart, Queen of France. 

"According to the old courtly creed of France, the privileges of the Scots 
Guard had an eminence that partook of sacredness. Twenty-four of them were told 
off as the special protectors of the royal person. They took charge of the keys of 
the chamber where the king slept, and the oratory where he paid his devotions. 
When, on a solemn progress, he entered a walled town, the keys were committed 
to the custody of the captain of the Guard. They guarded his boat as he crossed a 
ferry, and were essential to the support of his litter when he was carried. On ordi- 
nary occasions two of them stood behind him ; but in affairs of great ceremony — the 
reception of embassies, the conferring of high honors, the touching for the king's 
evil, and the like — six of them stood near the throne, three on either side. It was 
deemed a marked honor to them that the silk fringe with which their halberts were 
decorated was white, the royal color of France. 

"There is something melancholy beyond description in contemplating the con- 
dition of a country the vital treasures of which had to be confided to the fidelity 
and bravery of hireling strangers. If there was a fault in the affair, however, it 
was not with the Scots : they were true to their trust, and paid faith with faith. 

" On their side of the bargain, too, there is something touching in the picture 
of a hardy, high-spirited race robbed of their proper field of exertion at home, and 
driven to a foreign land, there to bestow the enterprising energy that might have 
made their own illustrious, and serving a foreign master with the single-minded 
fidelity that had been nourished within them by the love of their own land and 
kindred. But it must be admitted that their hospitable patrons made their exile 
mighty comfortable. When the lank youth left behind him the house of his an- 
cestors, standing up gray, cold, and bare on the bleak moorland, it was not to pass 
into hard sordid exile, but rather to exult in the prospect of a land of promise or 
El Dorado, and faithfully was the promise kept ; for the profuse hospitality and 
lavish generosity of France to her guests is a thing hardly to be elsewhere paralleled 
in history. It was but just that it should all be requited with sound fidelity and 
ardent devotion. 

"The trust which Louis XL reposed in the Guard has been already referred 
to. It was not their blame that he took their assistance in grubbing up the roots 
of all the political institutions which checked or modified the supreme authority of 
the Crown. If we were to suppose, indeed, that they passed beyond the routine of 
duty to think of the political results of the affairs in which they were engaged, they 
would find a good many partisans in the present day had they adopted the designs 
of their crafty master as their own, and backed them as the soundest policy for the 
future of France and of Europe at large, for Louis XL is by no means champion- 
less. 

" In one of the most amusing of all the chronicles ever written — that of Co- 
mines — the Scots Guard figure frequently and always creditably. Louis, who was 
reputed to trust no other creatures of human make, appears to have placed entire 
reliance on them. They saved him at a crisis of great peril in his renowned attack, 
along with the Duke of Burgundy, on the city of Liege. Both potentates were 
deeply plotting, the one to bring the Burgundian territories directly under the 
Crown of France, the other to change his Dukedom for a Kingdom, which might 
in the end comprise France itself. Both were of one mind, for the time, in deadly 



20 JAMES HEPBURN, 

malice and murderous projects against the industrious burghers of the city. By 
a concurrence of events which broke through the fine texture of his subtle policy, 
Louis found himself in the hands of his fierce rival, for he was within the lines of 
Burgundy's army, with no other resource or protection apparently but his Scots 
Guard. There was to be a storming of Liege, which was to be anticipated by the 
citizens breaking out and attacking the camp of the Duke. In the confusion of 
such an afi"air at such a juncture, it is easy to suppose that Louis could not know 
friends from enemies, and had reason to believe the enemies to be far the more 
prevalent of the two. Comines gives this distinct and homely narrative of what he 
saw of the afi'air, for he was present : 

" ' I, and two gentlemen more of his bed-chamber, lay that night in the Duke 
of Burgundy's chamber (which was very small), and above us there were twelve 
archers upon the guard, all of 'em in their clothes, and playing at dice. His main 
guard was at a good distance, and towards the gate of the town ; in short, the master 
of the house where the Duke was quartered, having drawn out a good party of the 
Liegeois, came so suddenly upon the Duke he had scarce time to put on his back 
and breast plate and clap a steel cap upon his head. As soon as he had done it 
we ran down the stairs into the street; but we found our archers engaged with 
the enemy, and much ado they had to defend the doors and the windows against 
'em.' . . . .' 

" The King was also assaulted after the same manner by his landlord, who en- 
tered his house, but was slain by the Scotch Guard. These Scotch troops behaved 
themselves valiantly, maintained their ground, would not stir one step from the 
King, and were very nimble with their bows and arrows, with which, it is said, they 
wounded and killed more of the Burgundians than of the enemy. . . . 

" French historians are tolerably unanimous in their testimony that the Guard 
were faithful follows. As a small select body of men, highly endowed with rank 
and remuneration, they were naturally the prize-holders of a considerable body of 
their countrymen, who in the army of France strove to prove themselves worthy of 
reception into the chosen band. Thus the Scots in the French army carried the 
spirit of the service beyond the mere number selected as the Guard ; and there was 
among them a fellow-feeling mixed with a devotion to the Crown of France, of a 
kind which there is no good term for in English, while it is but faintly expressed by 
the French esprit de corps. A few of the facts in the history of the Scots troops em- 
ployed by France bring it closer home than any generalization can ; for instance, after 
other incidents of a like character, M. Michel quotes from D'Anton's chronicle, how, 
in a contest with the Spaniards in Calabria, in 1503, the banner-bearer, William Turn- 
bull, was found dead with the staff in his arms and the flag gripped in his teeth, with 
a little cluster of his countrymen round him, killed at their posts, ' et si un Ecossais 
etait mort d'un cote un Espagnol ou deux I'etaient de I'autre.' The moral drawn 
from this incident by the old chronicler is that the expression long proverbial in 
France, ' Fier comme un Ecossais,' was because the Scots ' aimaient mieux mourir 
pour honneur garder, que vivre en honte, reprochezde tachede lachete.' 

" When the two British kingdoms merged towards each other in the sixteenth 
century, the native element was gradually turned out of the Scots Guard. When 
Scotland became part of an empire which called France the natural enemy, it 
seemed unreasonable that her sons should expect to retain a sort of supremacy in 
the French army. But there are no bounds to human unreasonableness when 
profitable ofiices are coming and going, and many of our countrymen during the 
seventeenth century were loud in their wrath and lamentation about the abstraction 
of their national privileges in France. Some Scotchmen, still in the Guard in the 
year 1611, had a quarrel with the French captain, De Montespan, and brought their 
complaints before King James. As French soldiers appealing to a foreign mon- 
arch, they were very naturally dismissed. Of course they now complained at home 
still more loudly, and their cause was taken up by some great men. The French 
behaved in the matter with great courtesy. The men dismissed for a breach of dis- 



EARL OF BOTHWELL. 21 

cipline could not be replaced at the instigation of a foreign Court, but the Govern- 
ment would fill their places with other Scotsmen duly recommended. So lately as 
the year 1642, demands were made on the French Government to renew the ancient 
League and restore the ' privileges' of the Scots in France, including the monopoly 
of the appointments in the Guard. But though made in the name of King Charles I. 
by the Scots Privy Council, these demands were, like many of the other transactions 
of the day, rather made in hostility to the King than in obedience to his commands. 
Louis XIV. gave a brief and effective answer to them. He said that he would re- 
new the League only on the condition that the Scots should cease to act as the ally of 
England, either by giving obedience to the King of that country 'or under pre- 
text of religion, without express permission from the King, their master,' — a pretty 
accurate diplomatic description of the position of the Covenanting force. 

" Down to the time when all the pomps and vanities of the French Crown 
were swept away along with its substantial power, the Scots Guard existed as 
pageant of the Court of France. In that immense conglomerate of all kinds of 
useful and useless knowledge, the ' Dictionnaire de Trevoux,' it is set forth that ' la 
premiere compagnie des Gardes du Corps de nos rois' is still called ' La Garde Ecos- 
saise,' thougji there was not then (1730) a single Scotsman in it. Still there were 
preserved among the young Court lackeys, who kept up the part of the survivors 
of the Hundred Years' War, some of the old formalities. Among these, when the 
Clerc du Guct challenged the guard who had seen the palace-gate closed, ' il repond 
en Ecossais, " I am hire" — c'est a dire, me voila;' and the lexicographer informs us 
that, in the mouths of the Frenchmen, totally unacquainted with the barbarous 
tongue in which the regimental orders had been originally devised, the answer 
always sounded, ' Ai am hire.' 

" In some luxurious libraries may be found a gorgeous volume in old morocco, 
heavily decorated with symbols of royalty, bearing on its engraved title-page that 
it is ' La Sacre de Louis XV, Koy de France et de JNavarre, dans I'Eglise de Keims, le 
Dimanche, xxv Octobre, MDCCXXII.' After a poetical inauguration, giving as- 
surance of the piety, the justice, the firmness, the devotion to his people of the new 
King, and the orthodoxy, loyalty, and continued peace that were to be the lot of 
France, with many other predictions wide of the truth that came to pass, there 
come a series of large pictures, representing the various stages of the coronation, 
and these are followed by full-dress and full-length portraits of the various high 
officers who figured on the solemn occasion. Among these we have the Capitaine 
des Gardes Ecossais in full state uniform. This has anything but a military aspect ; 
it is the single-breasted broad-flapped coat of the time, heavily embroidered, a short 
mantle, and a black cap, with a double white plume. The six guards are also rep- 
resented in a draped portrait. It is far more picturesque than that of their captain, 
yet, in its white satin, gold embroidery, and fictitious mail, it conveys much less of 
the character of the soldier than that of the court attendant. ... In the original 
engraving, by the way, the artist has thrown an air of absorbed devotedness into 
the very handsome countenance drawn by him, which is at variance, in some meas- 
ure, with the tone of the attitude and costume, as pertaining to a mere figure in a 
state pageant." 

Is it consistent with the remotest bounds of human perversity, not 
born of absolute personal hatred and unprincipled malice, to imagine 
for a moment that so great a king as the monarch of France, at a time 
when his realm was convulsed with civil and religious antagonism, 
when questions of state and feeling were riddles to be solved by steel, 
poison, or prostitution, M'ould have conferred one of the grandest 
charges of the crown — the care of his person, the guardianship of his 
privacy — to a foreigner if that stranger had not possessed the highest 



22 JAMES HEPBURN, 

reputation for courage and fidelity at home, for loyalty tried and un- 
stained by doubt, noble in appearance, equally noble in character, brave 
as the steel with which he had to guard and protect, and as strong in 
physical strength as determined in will and devotion ? The very 
attempt to caricature Bothwell in the light of the dignities to which he 
rose shows a petty malice which, if it were to be met with among libel- 
ers to-day, would inevitably awaken the conviction that a writer guilty 
of such scurrility was not worthy even the notice of a kicking. 

What were the antecedents of this Bothwell ? When James III. 
of Scotland lowered himself, according to the ideas of the aristocracy, 
to an association with plebeians or mechanics, the nobility asserted the 
rights they considered inherent in their class by hanging the king's 
favorites on the Bridge of Lander, all but one, a youth of seventeen 
named Ramsay. He was spared in answer to the entreaties of his 
master, who created him Lord or Earl of Bothwell. Even Dr. Pet- 
rick, our Bothwell's great defender, falls into the gross error of arguing 
that the nobility in 1540-67 hated the Bothwell who married Mary 
because he was descended from this plebeian Ramsay. James III. 
desired to bestow with the title the lordship of Bothwell upon Ram- 
say, but it " was not to be had, because it was in the fast grip of the 
Hepburns," — an ancient race, these Hepburns of Hales. Although 
this young royal favorite was made titular Lord Bothwell about 1482, 
his royal master did not live long enough to establish him. The con- 
federated nobility took up arms against their detested king in 1488, 
and defeated him at Sauchie-burn, 11th June of that year, near the 
famous Bannockburn battle-field, where THE Bruce won independence 
for Scotland, 25th June, 1314. Flying from the field, James III. was 
murdered at Beaton's Mill, on the east side of the Bannockburn, and 
his son James IV. succeeded. He created Lord Patrick Hepburn 
Earl of Bothwell, and bestowed upon him the hereditary office of Lord 
High Admiral of Scotland, along watli many other dignities and ex- 
tensive possessions. Plis son Adam, the second Earl, fell by the side 
of his king, James IV., in the Battle of Flodden, so fatal to the Scot- 
tish nobility. Sir Walter Scott commemorates his death in his poem of 
Marm ion, Canto IV., 1 xii.: 

" Another aspect Crichtoun showed, 
As through its portals Marmion rode; 
But yet 'twas melancholy state 
Received him at the outer gate ; 
For none were in the Castle then 
But women, boys, or aged men. 
With eyes scarce dried, the sorrowing dame 
To welcome noble Marmion came ; 
Her son, a stripling twelve years old, 
Proffer'd the Baron's rein to hold ; 
For each man that could draw a sword 
Had march'd that morning with their lord. 



EARL OF BOTHWELL. 23 

Earl Adam Hepb-urn, he who died 

On Flodden, by his sovereign's side. 

Long may his Lady look in vain : 

She ne'er shall see his gallant train 

Come sweeping back through Crichtoun Dean. 

'Twas a brave race before the name 

Of hated Bothwell stained their fame." 

It may be interesting to know how Crichtoun Castle came into the 
hands of the Hepburns. Lord Crichtoun, its previous owner, had 
seduced the Princess Margaret, sister to James III., out of revenge, it 
is said, because that Monarch had dishonored Crichtoun's own wife. 
The king, furious at this method of retaliation, this fair application 
of the lex talionis, besieged and took the Castle, and transferred it to 
the Hepburns. 

This Adam Bothwell distinguished himself greatly by a furious 
attempt, with the reserve, to retrieve the defeat at Flodden, as is cele- 
brated in an old poem, '' Flodden Field," edited by H. Weber, Edin- 
burgh, 1804 : 

"Then on the Scottish part, right proud, 
The Earl of Bothwell then out brast. 
And stepping forth, with stomach good 
Into the enemies' throng he thrust ; 
And Bothwell! Bot/uvell! cried bold, 
To cause his soldiers to ensue; 
But there he caught a welcome cold, — 
The Englishmen straight down him threw. 
Thus Haburn through his hardy heart 
His fatal fine in conflict found." 

Patrick, third Earl of Bothwell, was still a minor when his father, 
Adam, fell beside his king at Flodden. It is very curious, but none 
of the Bothwells lived long enough to see their children attain to 
majority. This third Earl, Patrick, was known to his countrymen as 
" the Fair Earl." The English, who found in him, as in his son after- 
wards, a patriotic antagonist to their schemes, defamed him, as they 
subsequently did his son. Sadler, the British representative, considered 
him " the most vain and insolent man in the world, full of pride and 
folly," or else "the proudest and haughtiest man in all Scotland." 
Evidently the English could not bend to their purposes or buy the 
honor of the third any more than the fourth Earl Bothwell. Hence 
tiieir venom. In 1535, Patrick married Agnes Sinclair. She belonged 
to a family of Norman origin, and one of the most renowned in Scot- 
land as well as on the continent of Europe. This Agnes, " the Lady 
of Morham," was the mother of a daughter, Jane, and a son, James, 
THE Bothwell of scandal, history, and romance. In 1543 she was 
divorced from her husband, who died three years after, in 1556. James, 
her son, never forfeited her affections, and she was his sood aup-el as 



24 JAMES HEPBURN, 

long as her influence could benefit him, that is, until he was finally 
driven from Scotland. She died in 1573. The divorce did not result 
from any wrong-doing on her part. There is little doubt that Earl 
Patrick took advantage of a plea which was a fertile cause of divorces 
as long as the Pope and Romanist priests had any power in his native 
country, — the plea of consanguinity. The real cause, no doubt, lay in 
the hopes entertained by Earl Patrick that, if he was free to marry, he 
could obtain the hand of Mary of Guise, widow of James V., Queen 
Dowager and Regent of Scotland. Thus he expected to become the 
real head and power and the source of honor in Scotland. He was 
justified in his expectation, since twice in writing the Queen Regent 
promised faithfully to marry him. Why she did not actually give her 
hand to the Fair Earl is susceptible of several explanations. Rumor 
insinuated that she was overfond of the Primate, Cardinal Beaton. His 
cloth forbade the idea of a legal tie. While this consideration was 
pending, Earl Patrick died. James Y. died in 1542, Earl Both well 
was divorced in 1543, and died in 1556, and Mary, the Regent, expired 
10th June, 1560. The strange doings of " the fair Earl," Patrick, whose 
ways were often dark and tricks vain, cast a black shadow over the 
career of his son, the heir to his titles, properties, and dignities. It is 
admitted by all fair critics that the two have been often confounded to 
the detriment of the latter. The father's evil reputation was in some 
respects an almost fatal injury to the son. 

In aspiring to the hand of the famous Mary, James Hepburn, Earl of 
Both well, the subject of this article, was simply obeying the traditions of 
his house, and taking advantage of his qualifications and position. When 
Mary's first husband, Francis II., died, Bothwell was the trusted, tried, 
almost single true-hearted supporter of her mother and the latter's agent 
in France. It is true that the hand of the young widow was sought by 
princes and the sons of kings, but among the suitors proposed and pro- 
posing were nobles strongly pressed who were not as eminent as Bothwell. 
Finally the list of the eligible was reduced to two ; Dudley, a younger 
son, the choice of Elizabeth and her darling, who was not created Earl of 
Leicester until this contemplated elevation was quite advanced, and 
Darnley, who was of no account and without influence until he was 
promoted to an Earldom, which was not done until about a month after 
he had been " handfasted" to Mary. Bothwell was born the most 
richly endowed and powerful nobleman, except Lord Hamilton, in 
Scotland, with the greatest number of vassals in that southern portion 
of the kingdom, a belted Earl and Lord High Admiral of the Realm, 
Sheriff" of three counties, Bailiff" or Queen's representative in another. 
When he was certainly not over twenty-eight years of age he was I^ieu- 
tenant-General under the Crown, and virtually Commander-in-Chief of 
the Scottish army in the field. What is more, he sat in Parliament 
before he was of age, and was Lieutenant-General, or Warden of the 



EARL OF BOTH WELL. 25 

Borders, as soon as he attained his majority, and Queen's Commissioner, 
or Representative, to guard the interests of the Crown and his country, 
in opposition to the English agents (one the Duke of Bedford), before 
Darnley made his appearance. Finally, not to spin out the story, he 
was Captain of the IFrench Scots, or Royal, Guard, in his twenty-sev- 
enth year. If this does not prove manliness and character, what will 
suffice to satisfy opinion on such subjects? 

What is more and more to the point, the Hepburns had always 
aimed high. A Hepburn of Bothwell married a sister of the great 
Robert Bruce, the victor of Bannockburn and deliverer of Scotland in 
1290. The grandfather of the first Earl, Patrick, of Hales, held very 
curious relations in regard to the beautiful Jane Beaufort, widow of 
James I., who died in 1436. This Lord Patrick Hepburn, of Hales, 
was master of the famous Castle of Dunbar, and there, with him, the 
lovely Jane spent her latter days and died. History has never solved 
the riddle of the ties that united them. Adam, son of this Lord 
Patrick, Avas among the many lovers of Mary of Gueldres, widow of 
James IL, deceased in 1460. Is it very extraordinary that James 
Hepburn should not forget the good fortune of his great-great-great- 
grandfather and of his great-great-grandfather when they were simple 
Lords and not mighty Earls, and of his father, the third great " belted" 
Earl ? When and where — after he w^as old enough to experience the 
power of love — he first saw Queen Mary does not appear. But this 
fact is well known, he was very high in the favor of her mother 
when, early in 1561, at Joinville, in France, shortly after the death of 
her royal husband, he did wait upon the peerless " La Reine Blanche," 
to whom, according to the poets, even the trees and rocks bowed and 
did obeisance as she walked through the forest and glades of Fon- 
tainebleau, or, as Ronsard sang : 

" The ivory whiteness of thy bosom fair ; 
The long and slender hand, so soft and rare ; 
Thy all-surpassing look and form of love, 
pSnchanting as a vision from above ; 
Then thy sweet voice and music of thy speech, 
That rocks and woods might move, nor art could reach,— 
"When these are lost, fled to a foreign shore, 
"With loves and graces France beholds no more, 
How shall the poet sing now thou art gone ? 
For silent is the muse since thou hast flown. 
All that is beauteous short time doth abide ; 
The rose and lily only bloom while lasteth the springtide. 

" Thus here, in France, thy beauty only shone 
For thrice five years, and suddenly is gone ; 
Like to the lightning-flash, a moment bright, 
To leave but darkness and regret like night, 
To leave a deathless memory behind. 
Of that fair princess, in my heart enshrined. 
4 



26 JA3IES HEPBURN, 

My wnnged thoughts, like birds, now fly to thee, 
My beauteous princess, and her home I see, 
And there for evermore I fain would stay, 
Nor from that sweetest dwelling ever stray. 

" Nature hath ever, in her deepest floods. 
On loftiest hills, in lonely rocks and woods, 
Her choicest treasures hid from mortal ken, 
With rich and precious gems unseen of men. 
The pearl and ruby sleep in secret stores, 
And softest perfumes spring on wildest shores. 
Thus God, who over thee his watch doth keep, 
Hath borne thy beauty safe across the deep 
On foreign shore, in regal pride to rest. 
Far from mine eyes, but hidden in my breast." 

One of the most extraordinary and unaccountable facts connected 
witli the history of Mary Stuart is the contradictory and irreconcilable 
evidence in regard to her personal appearance.* The only likeness which 
is known to be authentic is that recognized as '' the famous Siieffield 
portrait/' preserved in Hard wick Hall and belonging to the Duke 
of Devonshire. It represents the Queen in her thirty-sixth year, as 

* " As there are ill-fated persons, there are also ill-fated families. The fortunes 
of Mary are but one scene in the long and fearful Tragedy of the Stuarts. Her 
ancestor in the sixth degree upwards, King Robert III., had a nephew named 
Alexander Stuart, who, at the begmning of the fifteenth century, -murdered Malcolm 
Druinmond, the brother of the Q^ueen of Scotland, and married his widoiv Isabella, 
luith her consent, — a counterpart or antitype of the history of Darnley, Bothwell, and 
Mary. The Duke of Albany, brother of King Robert, threw his son and his own 
nephew Rothsay into prison, and let him starve till he gnawed the flesh oflfhis own 
limbs, and then died. As soon as Rothsay 's brother, James I., the father of Mary's 
great-great-grandfather, ascended the throne, he sought and found an opportunity 
to have all the sons of the Duke of Albany beheaded, for which, in the year 1436, 
and partly by his own relations, he was attacked and killed with sixteen wounds. 
James's widow sacrificed the perpetrators to the manes of her husband in a manner 
which calls to mind the vengeance of Queen Agnes for King Albert of Germany. 
James II., Mary's great-great-grandfather, caused two of his cousins, the Douglasses, 
to be beheaded, murdered the third with his own hands, and perished by a violent 
death at the siege of Roxburgh. His son, James III., Mary's great-grandfather, 
was engaged in a sanguinary contest, first with his brother, the Duke of Albany, 
and then with his own son. He lost, against the latter, the battle of Sauchieburn, 
and was assassinated on his flight. James IV., Mary's grandfather, did not enjoy 
the happiness which he expected in the sovereignty that he had unjustlj' acquired, 
and was killed in the battle of Floddenfield. James V., Mary's father, lost his 
senses through grief at the disobedience of the nobility and the failure of his plans, 
and died eight days after the birth of his daughter. 

" Such were the ancestors of Mary ! and now her descendants : James I. (VI.), 
Charles I., Charles II., and James II., four kings of whom it is difficult to say 
whether they were more unfortunate or more unworthy. Before the Stuarts lost 
their power for the second time and forever, James II. caused his nephew, the Duke 
of Monmouth, to be executed, and thus concluded the three hundred years' series 
of bloody deeds and fortunes of this ill-fated race!" — ^^Contributions to Modern 
History, from the British Museum and the State Paper Office, known as (^ueen 
Elizabeth and Queen Mai-y." By Frederick von Raumer, London, 1836, p. 430-2. 



UARL OF BOTHWELL. 27 

an extremely tall, long-faced, long-nosed, long-limbed, long-fingered 
woman, with a very decided cast in the right eye. Her mother was a 
woman of heroic proportions, and Mary must have towered as well, 
for in a picture of herself and Darnley, who was known as a "well- 
made, long lad," she equals her husband in height. The beautiful 
picture which is accepted as a trustworthy portrait of Mary, was " con- 
structed to satisfy his ideal," on the order of her biographer, Chalmers, 
by Mr. Pailou, "a very ingenious artist," who took the picture, owned 
by the Earl of Morton, as the basis of his work, which (the original) 
was burned with the Castle of Alloa, in which it had been preserved, 
in 1800. , 

" The painter," says Dr. Stoddart, who saw this picture a few 
months before its destruction, " was no mean artist ; and the })iece, 
though hard, was highly finished. The features were probably drawn 
with accuracy, hnt what little character they possessed ivas unpleasant, 
and might better have suited the cold and artful Elizabeth than the tender, 
animated Mary. It appeared, however, to have been painted at an 
age when she had been long written ' in sour Misfortune's book ;' and 
had perhaps lost that warmth of feeling which was at once the bane of 
her happiness and the charm of her manners." 

The color of Mary's eyes varies — according to different writers — 
from the blue or gray, which are not distinguishable, to dark brown, 
and the hue of her hair from a flaxen inclining to red, through every 
intermediate shade, to dark brown or black. The writer possesses or 
has seen over a hundred portraits, and no two are alike. In one taken in 
France at the time of her marriage with the Dauphin she has reddish- 
yellow hair and light eyes, and in the " Hardwick portrait," painted at 
the close of her life, she has small, very dark, cunning eyes, a foxy nose, 
and black or dark brown hair. It is more than probable that if she 
had not been a Queen she would not have attracted notice by her looks. 
How, then, has the almost universal mistake occurred in regard to 
her personal attractiveness ? Bell, perhaps, explains it (Life of Mary, 
i. 74). There was a noblewoman, "a celebrated Continental beauty, a 
Countess of Mansfeldt," prominent at the Court of France during 
the life of Mary, who, it was claimed, bOre a striking resemblance 
to the Scottish Queen. Portraits of this lady were multiplied and 
dispersed throughout Europe, and these — not originals from life — are 
the likenesses which have been accepted as correct presentations of the 
unfortunate Mary Stuart. 

Before dismissing this consideration, which results in the conviction 
that Mary's transcendent beauty is a myth, it may satisfy the credulous 
to know that in Dalkeith Castle, " the principal residence of tlie noble 
{sic) family of Morton," there was another authentic ( ?) portrait of the 
Queen. Of this Gilpin, the tourist or traveler, writes thus: "Here, 
and in almost all the great houses of Scotland, we have pictures of 



28 JA3IES HEPBURN, 

Queen Mary ; but their authenticity is often doubted from the cir- 
cumstance of her liair. In one it is auburn, in another black, and 
in another yellow. Notwithstanding, however, this difference, it is 
very possible that all these pictures may be genuine. [How can this 
possibly be?] We have a letter preserved, from Mr. White, a servant 
of Queen Elizabeth, to Sir William Cecil, in which he mentions his 
liaving seen Queen Mary at Tutbury Castle. ' She is a goodly per- 
sonage,' says he, ' hath an alluring grace, a pretty Scottish speech, a 
searching wit, and great mildness. Her hair of itself is black; but 
Mr. Knolls told me that she wears hair of sundry colorsJ " 

That Mary was fascinating in an ^Imost inconceivable degree, 
highly educated and accomplished, endowed with a brilliant and active 
mind, " mens sana in corpore sano," there can be no doubt, and her epis- 
tolary style has been greatly eulogized. Bothwell, by several styled 
almost illiterate, wrote much better than she did, and yet no one ever 
extolled his compositions. She has been styled a poet ; she did write 
pretty verses it is true; but not better than hundreds who furnish 
contributions to magazines at a stipulated price per page, and even 
her famous lines on quitting France are said to have been written 
subsequently for her by a better " maker," — i.e., real poet. 

The fact is she was an accomplished coquette and permeated with 
electrifying feline fascination, and she was a crowned head. The title 
put the seal to the whole. Endowed with natural graces, enhanced by 
her sojourn in the most polished court of Europe, she must have ap- 
peared like a phenomenon amid the brutal beauties of Scotland, and 
as a living light amid " the darkness which could be felt" of the 
manners and morals of the Scottish nobility of a savage and uncultured 
period. As a Woman, in the presence-chamber or a ball-room she was 
enchanting, and as a Queen, the mode and the rage, an Enchantress. 

" Can a queen ever know whether it is her face or her diadem that 
is loved? That rays of her starry crown dazzle the eyes and the 
heart. ... A queen is something so far removed from men, so ele- 
vated, so widely separated from them, so impossible for them to reach ! 
What presumption dare flatter itself in such an enterprise? It is not 
simply a woman, it is an august and sacred being that has no sex, and 
that is worshipped kneeling without being loved." 

Mary was a Circe, like the "fttir-locked goddess," daughter of 
Helios (the Sun) and of the Oceanide, Perse. James V., the father of 
Mary, was a Sun, in intellect and intention, among his unlettered no- 
bility and subjects, and from him his daughter derived all those bril- 
liant characteristics for which she is extolled. From her mother, Mary 
of Guise, she inherited certain solid qualities which momentarily seemed 
to invest her with a power truly masculine — nay, at times almost super- 
human — in meeting difficulty and confronting danger and death. These 
properties doubtless inclined her to the " eeal man," James Hepburn, 



EARL OF BOTH WELL. 29 

the fearless, the faithful, and the phoenix amid the general reverse about 
her. What Ulysses was to Circe, Both well was to Mary, and just as 
ihe mythical enchantress became much attached to the unfortunate 
Greek hero and held him in the bondage of her superhuman blandish- 
ments for about a year, even so the intimate connection between Mary 
and Bothwell began to exhibit its passionate fervor shortly after the 
murder of Rizzio, — which occurred on the night of the 9th-10th March, 
1566, — and terminated by their forcible separation at Carberry Hill, 
on the 15th June, 1567. Tennyson's strong but exquisite verses — a 
soliloquy which he attributes to the King of Ithaca — might serve as an 
equally apposite utterance for the Scottish Earl. Nay more, the Odyssey 
does not relate strang-er natural adventures — castino; aside the fabulous — 
than befell James Hepburn ; with the final fatal difference that Ulysses 
at the close found a fond and constant wife, hoping against hope, to 
welcome his restoration to her arms, whereas Bothwell perished in a 
distant prison, abandoned by an inconstant, intriguing consort, forget- 
ful of her faithful knight and devoted worshiper in a new-born inane 
and insane passion for a far lesser man, the silly Duke of Norfolk. 

Ulysses on the rocky shore of Ithaca — BothAvell on the storm -beat 
ramparts of Dunbar — about to sail forth to his fearful doom — speaks : 

" It little profits that an idle [Erie], 
By this still hearth, among these barren crags, 
Match'd with a wife [no matej,® I mete and dole 
Unequal laws unto a savage race, 
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. 
I cannot rest from travel : / will drink 
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy'd 
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those 

8 Whoever, without bias, studies the occurrences of this epoch, must recognize 
that the marriage of Bothwell with Jane Gordon was one rather of policy than of 
affection, because the Earl's passion for Mary manifested itself clearly long before 
this union was brought about by the Queen. The question of why, if Mary had 
any predilection for Bothwell and already hated Darnley, she favored a result which 
was apparently so inimical to a future connection with the man who was gradually 
winning his way deeper and deeper into her heart of hearts, has been answered by 
Burton with his usual skill in solving a number of historical riddles. " It was a 
political alliance for strengthening the cause of the Queen and her husband" (iv. 
126). " The interest taken by Queen Mary in this marriage has been pitted against 
the many presumptions that her heart then belonged to Bothwell. But experience 
in poor human nature teaches us that people terrified hy the pressure of temptation do 
sometimes set up barriers against it which they aftei'wards make frantic efforts to 
get over^' (iv. 139). Jane Gordon had her vicissitudes, but the way in which she 
took them showed a quiet spirit^ fitted to m,ake the best of existing conditions'^ (iv. 
219-2). Bothwell's wife was no sooner satisfied that a competence would be secured 
to her than she was perfectly willing to yield up and release her husband to gratify 
his wishes and those of the Queen. Chalmers (i. 160) says she " brought a suit with 
equal alacrity," the more willingly that the divorce was to insure and augment the 
pecuniary and political condition of her brother, the Earl of Huntley, and her other 
kin. The marriage and the divorce were both matters of bargain and sale. " ^?i 
dabit?" "Dabitur!" 



30 JA3IES HEPBURN, 

That loved me, and alone ; on shore, and when 

Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades 

Vext the dim sea : I am become a name ; 

For always roaming with a hungry heart. 

Much have I seen and known ; cities of men 

And manners, climates, councils, governments, 

Myself not least, but honor'd of them all ; 

And drunk delight of battle with my peers, 

******* 

Yet all experience is an arch where thro' 

Gleams that untravel'd world, whose margin fades 

Forever and forever when I move. 

How dull it is to pause, to make an end, 

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use I 

As tho' to breathe were life. Life piled on life 

"Were all too little, ... 

Little remains : but every hour is saved 

From that eternal silence, something more, 

A bringer of new things ; and vile it were 

For some three suns to store and hoard myself, 

And this gray spirit yearning in desire 

To follow knowledge, like a sinking star, 

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. 

******* 
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners. 
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me — 
That ever with a frolic welcome took 
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed 
Free hearts, free foreheads — . . . 
Death closes all ; but something ere the end, 
Some work of noble note, may yet be done. 
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. 
. . . Come, my friends, 

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. 

Push ofi", and sitting well in order smite 

The sounding furrows ; for my purpose holds 

To sail beyond the sun [rise] . . . 

Until I die. 

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down : 

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles. 

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' 

We are not now that strength which in old days 

Moved earth and heaven, tlmt which we are, we are: 

One equal temper of heroic hearts, 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." 

Mary, torn by rebel force and serpent guile from the side of the 
husband of her choice at Carberry Hill, 15th June, 1567, expiated her 
foolish confidence in the pledges of a subject who was either the obtuse 
tool of a vile aristocratic faction or a willing factor in one of the most 
cruel and atrocious plots ever engendered in the black hearts of a bold 
and cunning, but sordid and soulless, confederacy of " irreconcilable" 
magnates. General history with its usual unreal counterfeit (Victor 



EARL OF BOTHWELL. 31 

Hugo's " meneehme") of truth, but its ordinary real perversion of facts, 
accepts Kirkaldy of Grange as the type of a chivalrie soldier, knight, 
and gentleman. Those who have investigated closely deny to him the 
principles consistent with such a character, and charge that he was no 
better than a subsidized spy and agent of the Ministers of Elizabeth, 
the deadly enemies of his country and his sovereign, and a man who, 
under the mask of truth and honor, was no better than a courageous 
and able military setter-in-array-of-battle. Whether himself betrayed 
and betrayer, or " betrayer and betrayed," Mary owed to his impulse 
the fatal fall which toppled her over into the abyss. In her first 
plunge she caught on the sharp walls of Lochleven Castle, enjoyed a 
short spasm of hope when she escaped through the devotion of the 
bold George and the " little Willie" Douglas, was again thrust down 
into the darker depth through the principal instrumentality of the 
same Kirkaldy of Grange at Langside, 15th May, 1568, whence she 
fell deeper and deeper into the weary heart-wrench — that captivity of 
eighteen years — which ended on the block at the age of forty-four, in 
Fotheringay Castle, 8th February, 1587. 

Seeino^ that this article is intended rather as a vindication of the 
calumniated BothwelP than a narrative, seriatim, of the career of Mary, 
she must become a secondary personage in the consideration in order to 
compress what is necessary to rehabilitate the Earl within the space 
accorded. Therefore, with reference to the single incident in her life 
almost unknown to the reading public and scarcely revealed until 
within the year, the reader must pass to more prosaic matter. It has 
been claimed and urged with intense feeling, and argued with a bitter- 
ness which demonstrates that a verdict, just or unjust, was the only 
object, that Mary regretted her marriage with Bothwell. The exact 
contrary is the truth. Mary had a perfect opportunity to escape from 
him when the rebels, her pretended friends and his enemies, invested 
Borthwick Castle. Bothwell got away before the stronghold was com- 
pletely invested, Mary rejected the invitation of those who claimed to 
be her rescuers from outrage, and disguised and mounted as a man, 
she fled by night to throw herself into the arms of her expectant hus- 
band. " She only entreated that she might be put on board of a ship 
with her husband, and left to drift wherever fortune might lead her." 
She represented " how much they wronged her in desiring to separate 
her from her husband, with whom she thought to live and die in the 

'' In preparing these remarks upon this extraordinary man Bothwell, a large 
number of authorities have been examined and a careful analysis of their views 
presented, — results of the most careful criticism. The immediate conclusion is in 
some measure a free translation — with interesting episodes from other sources — of 
the brief and argument of Dr. Phil A. Petrick (Berlin — St. Petersburg, 1874). 
whose labors have been almost exhaustive. His final decision on the most important 
points in controversy reverses almost every other judgment hitherto published, and, 
as a whole, is most favorable to Bothwell. 



32 JA3IES HEPBURN, 

greatest happiness," " nor will consent by any persuasion to abandon 
Both well for her husband, but answereth constantly that she will live 
and die with him ; and said that if it were put to her choice to re- 
linquish her crown and kingdom or Both well, she would leave her 
kingdom and dignity to live as a simple demoiselle with him, and that 
she will never consent that he shall be worse off or have more harm 
than herself." " They parted, as we are told, like fond lovers with 
many kisses, and much sorrow on her part." — (Burton, iv. 246.) She 
was scarcely separated from him when she wrote to him a letter 
which greatly aggravated her sorry situation ; she strove, again and 
again, to send letters to him from Lochleven Castle; and her first 
thought was of him 'after her escape from its grim dungeon, and the 
first act of her freedom was to send off a messenger to seek him out 
wherever he might be and let him know that she was free and craved a 
reunion with the lord of her heart and person. 

Such passages might be multiplied, but to the point. When Eliza- 
beth, touched at length with pity at the forlorn condition of her sister 
queen, sent her agent, Tlirockmorton, to Scotland, he reported that she 
would not renounce Bothwell as a husband, that "she will by no means 
yield to abandon Bothwell for her husband, nor relinquish him, which 
matter will do her most harm of all, and hardens those Lords to great 
severity against her." 

Furthermore, she clung to him because she was with child by him. 
Here is a mystery and as great a one, although not so well known, as 
that of the famous " Iron Mask" of the time of Louis XIV. Both 
are even yet unsolved and now perhaps insoluble. What is known 
of this child ? 

Lingard (v. 90 (2) ), citing three authorities; Rapen (1733), ii. 83 
(2); Miss Agnes Strickland, in her "Life of Mary Stuart," edition 
ii. vol. ii. p. 58 ; and Burton (Scribner and Welford's Edition), iv. 
362-3, and notes 1 and 2, and others either refer to or furnish particu- 
lars as to this child — 

" Poor scapegoat of crimes, where — her part what it may, 

So tortured, so hunted to die ; 
Poul age of deceit and of hate-^on her head 

Least stains of gore-guiltiness lie; 
To the hearts of the just her blood from the dust 

Not in vain for mercy will cry. 

" Poor scapegoat of nations and faiths in their strife, 

So cruel — and thou so fair ! 
Poor girl ! so best, in her misery named — 

Discrowned of two kingdoms, and bare ; 
Not first nor last on this one was cast 

The burden that others should share" — 

whose career is worked up into the novel " Unknown to History," 



EARL OF BOTHWELL. 33 

by Charlotte M. Yonge, author of the " Heir of Redclyife," etc., of 
which the Frejace bears date 27th February, 1882. At page 99, and 
note annexed, in the writer's " Study," " Mary, Queen of Scots," given 
to the public about the 1st February, 1882, nearly a month previous to 
the date of Miss Yonge's Preface, the particulars of the Birth and 
Fate of this child are presented. Raumer, in his " Queen Elizabeth 
and Queen Mary," Letter XXI., quotes the correspondence of the 
English Envoy on this subject. 

Labanoff, or his Editor, under date 1568, states: "In February 
(nine months after marriage), Marie Stuart gives birth at Lochleven to 
a daughter, who is taken to France, where she becomes afterwards a 
Nun at Notre de Soissons." 

The note to this reads as follows : "The pregnancy of the Queen 
of Scotland has been denied by Gilbert Stuart, who wrote in 1782 ; but 
Dr. Lingard, having reproduced this fact as unshaken in his history of 
England, I have considered myself compelled to adopt his version, re- 
lying especially on the testimony of Le Laboureur, a very praiseworthy 
historian, who, in his additions to the Memoires of Castelnau (French 
Ambassador to Scotland at the time), vol. i. p. 610, edition of 1731, . 
speaks of the daughter of Marie Stuart. [This is the Castelnau to 
whom Agnes Strickland, in her " Life of Mary Stuart," alludes in such 
very high terms.] 

" It must be remembered that the author (Le Laboureur) cited, 
filled a post of confidence at the Court of France (he was Counsellor 
and Almoner to the King), and that he had every means of knowing 
the different particulars kept secret for so long a time. Besides, when 
he published his work it was easy for him to consult the Registers of 
the Convent of Notre Dame de Soissons, and to assure himself in fact 
if the daughter of Marie Stuart had been a Nun therein." 

There is no portrait of Bothwell, but wherever he is represented in 
pictures, he always appears like what Petrick styles him, "a real 
MAN." It will be shown in the course of this article that he not only 
had great mental power, but that for his time his education had been 
anything but neglected. The panegyrist of the falsest of false Scottish 
nobles, the Regent Murray, — whom Mary so hated that she granted a 
pension to his murderer, — is scarcely more complimentary to Bothwell 
than one of the most zealous advocates of Mary, while others who have 
examined into the facts dispassionately depict the Earl as a fallen angel, 
but still invested with all the glorious outer attractions of one of the 
highest of the condemned celestial hierarchy. According to Dargaud 
and his school, Bothwell was worthy the imagery of " Paradise Lost" : 

" and next him Moloch, scepter'd king, 

Stood up, the strongest and the fiercest spirit 
That fought in Heav'n, now fiercer by despair: 
His trust was with th' Eternal to be deeni'd 



34 ^ JAMES HEPBURN, 

Equal in strength, and rather than be less 
Car'd not to be at all ; with that care lost 
Went all his fear ; of God, or Hell, or worse 
He reck'd not, and these words thereafter spake. 
My sentence is for open war : of wiles, 
More unexpert, I boast not : them let those 
Contrive who need, or when they need, not now. 



On this side nothing ; and by proof we feel 

Our pow'r sufficient to disturb his Heav'n, 

And with perpetual inroads to alarm, 

Though inaccessible, his fatal throne: 

"Which if not victory is yet revenge. 

He ended frowning, and his look denounc'd 

Desperate revenge, and battel dangerous 

To less than gods. On th' other side uprose 

Belial, — [Murray] — in act more graceful and humane; 

A fairer person lost not Heav'n ; he seem'd 

For dignity compos'd and high exploit : 

But all was false and hollow ; though his tongue 

Dropt manna, and could make the worse appear 

The better reason, — " 

Here is a very apposite contrast between Bothwell (Moloch), auda- 
cious, fearless, fiery, and impulsive, and Murray (Belial), sleek, cun- 
ning, cautious, brave, but not bold, and plausible. 



In the forenoon of the 6th October, 1566, Bothwell started for the 
Borders, where a serious disturbance demanded his presence, in advance 
of the Queen. The Armstrongs, Elliots, and Johnstons (" Border-ruf- 
fians" we would style them to-day) were at war with each other. It 
was on this occasion that he was himself severely wounded in a personal 
encounter with John Elliot, of Park, a noted Borderer, whom some call 
a robber, others an insurgent. According to Chalmers (ii. 108), Elliot 
had some claim to the succession of the Hermitage. This could 
scarcely be, since it was an hereditary appanage of the Hepburns. Both- 
well, however, despite his own wounds, finally killed Elliot after a 
protracted and exceptional struggle. Partly from error, partly from 
ill-will, this affair has been very miich misrepresented. Bothwell's 
personal courage has even been assailed by his inveterate calumniators, 
particularly the vile Buchanan, or the adventure set aside as being 
romance. The very antagonism of his calumniators establishes Both- 
well's worth, for " it must not be forgotten that the Border warriors 
were not to be influenced except by i^ersonal bravery.''^ A few days later, 
but as soon as circumstances permitted, " Mary flew, as it were, with the 
impatience of a lover," to visit Bothwell. 

Did Mary hasten to the side of her severely wounded Lieutenant- 
General in obedience to the yearning of affection, or simply in response 



EABL OF BOTHWELL. 35 

to the promptings of gratitude for peril encountered in her service and 
admiration of a duty gallantly performed ? To any student who has 
had experience of life, — not the humdrum career of the respectable — so 
styled — citizen, but of the man of the world, — to any one who has 
been not only " a looker-on in Vienna," but a participant in the varied 
enjoyments which that capital affords, Mary's motive could have been 
neither more nor less than the passion which furnishes the theme of one 
of the most agreeable of recent operettas, in which the most charming 
chorus rings with 

" 'Tis love! love! love!" 

More argument has been devoted to this question than it would 
appear, at first blu.sh, to deserve, but the consequences were eventually 
momentous. To ordinary readers it seems a mere episode, because few 
are aware that the fate of English Protestantism hinged on the con- 
nection of Mary with Bothwell. That it did so is ably shown by a careful 
statement of cause and effect, as set forth clearly in a remarkable book 
entitled "The Coming Man," published in London in 1881. As a 
consideration preliminary to the visit to the Hermitage it is necessary 
to investigate when Mary began to evince that partiality for Bothwell 
which developed unto a iioneymoon but a few hours longer than a lunar 
month and terminated in life-long misery to both. According to the 
judgment of those who seek to defend or clear up the character of the 
Queen, her affection for Bothwell cannot be traced back much more than 
a year, and flamed out after the murder of Kizzio, 9th March, 1566. 
One argument in favor of this view, apparently unanswerable, is her 
permitting him to marry Lady Jane Gordon, 24th February, 1566. 
Burton (iv. 139) deprives this plea of any force. Comparing dates and 
indications, the Queen's partiality for the Earl can be followed back — 
as a savage detects and pursues a trail — to the period when, after her 
return from France in 1561, she had grasped the sceptre firmly. The 
miserable Darnley episode flared up like the firing of a dry brush-heap 
and sunk into embers even before the murder of her favorite secretary, 
to be extinguished with the indignant tears wrung from her fair eyes by 
that worse than useless crime. From this time forward, Bothwell was the 
first man in Scotland, and when in consequence of the performance of 
his duty as Warden of the Marches lie lay dying, as was supposed, — in 
his ancestral stronghold and official headquarters, the "Hermitage," — 
Mary galloped thither from Jedburgh, "a stiff twenty miles' journey." 
This estimate of the distance is small, because she did not take the 
shortest route. If the tradition be true, she made a circuit and was 
nearly lost in a dangerous morass, still called the " Queen's Mire." Into 
this her famous white palfrey plunged and was with difficulty extri- 
cated. The ride is really much longer; nearly, if not fully, twenty- 
four miles. As she returned to Jedburgh on the same day, it was a feat 



36 JAMES HEPBURN, 

that must have tested the endurance of a practiced rider. Sir Walter 
Scott, who is by no means favorable on any occasion to Bothwell, 
admits that it is an open question " whether she (the Queen) visited a 
wounded subject, or a lover in danger." Tlie Wizard of the North adds : 
"The Queen's Mire is still a pass of danger, exhibiting, in many 
places, the bones of the horses which have been entangled in it. For 
what reason the Queen chose to enter Liddesdale, by the circuitous 
route of Hawick, is not told. There are other two passes from Jed- 
burgh to Hermitage Castle ; the one by the Note of the Gate, the other 
over the mountain called Winburgh. Either of these, but especially 
the latter, is several miles shorter than that by Hawick and the Queen's 
Mire. But, by the circuitous way of Hawick, the Queen could 
traverse the districts of more friendly clans than by going directly int© 
the disorderly province of Liddesdale." 

Mary's self-constituted champions furthermore insist, to divest the 
expedition of any remarkable character, that this ride occurred at a 
fine season of the year. If there were positive records that the 
weather was absolutely or unseasonably fine on that particular day, it 
might be an argument and a proof. Without such evidence to the con- 
trary, it is well known that the weather in the region traversed, late in 
October, is as a rule anything but propitious for female equestrianism. 
Even after a lapse of over three centuries Burton (iv. 177), who has 
walked over the ground, states: "The author [Burton] knows, from 
having walked over the ground, that Hermitage Castle is a stiff twenty 
miles' journey [direct road for a pedestrian] from Jedburgh." 

The Queen remained two hours, " to Bothwell's great pleasure and 
content," with him. After she had galloped back, twenty to twenty- 
four miles or even more, to Jedburgh, despite her fatigue, she sjient a 
great part of the night writing to Bothwell; some say on business, 
others from affection. Lingard attempts to demonstrate that a woman 
— especially one who had undergone great fatigue all the previous day 
— who had just spent hours with her lover would not be likely to 
waste the hours which should be devoted to rest in writing to liim, the 
more particularly when she could see this lover the next day if she 
chose, or might reasonably expect to see him very soon. This argu- 
ment appeared to be inconsequential and weak even to the phlegmatic 
German, Raumer, who remarks thereupon that if it proves anything it 
proves clearly that Lingard, himself, had never been in love. What- 
ever motive actuated the Queen in what she did, the result of the 
anxiety, fatigue, and the preceding and subsequent labors was a fever 
which very nearly proved fatal to her. 

From this time forward any one M'ho doubts that Mary's passion for 
the Earl was growing more and more irresistible, knows nothing of 
life and nothing of women. The great barrier between them was 
Darnley. Nothing could demolish that but death. That he was to 



EARL OF BOTHWELL. 37 

die was soon determined. Simply the " how" and the " when" re- 
mained to be decided. When the plan was arranged, Mary lured him 
to his place of doom. Little search is needed to find proofs that 
Both well's wife constituted an obstacle of little consequence. The 
lands of her brother, the Earl of Huntley, had been confiscated. He 
was seeking their restoration. Lady Jane seems to have been perfectly 
willing to make a fair bargain to get herself out of the way. There 
was collusion all around. The great feudal nobility, — a precious set 
of rascals, than whom a more mean, cruel, self-seeking, totally unprin- 
cipled set scarcely appear, elsewhere, in history, — for divers reasons, 
wanted to be rid of Darnley as King-Consort; Mary desired to be 
quit of him as a husband ; Bothwell as a rival, in chances if not in 
the heart of the woman he loved, and all the rest, closely or remotely 
concerned, were perfectly willing to do all that was required to be done 
to show themselves agreeable to all parties. 

In spite of the hundreds of volumes that have been published on 
this subject, and the still more numerous articles, Darnley did not lose 
his life by the measures taken by Bothwell, or by the hands or violence 
of the Earl's own personal following. Goodhall proclaimed the fact a 
good many years ago and was laughed at for it : " but Mr. Goodhall has 
adopted the most ridiculous and extravagant hypothesis of all, and has 
endeavored to prove that even BothAvell was not the murderer." Theo- 
dor Opitz, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1879, in his "Maria Stuart," 170- 
2, and Dr. Ernst Bekker (Giessen), 1881, in his "Maria Stuart, Darly, 
[which Dr. Petrick maintains as the proper spelling of the name], 
Bothwell," 67-83, demonstrate conclusively that, notwithstanding all 
the sneering at his conclusion, Goodhall was right. Unquestionably 
Bothwell was guilty in intent. But, what says Shakspeare on " Intent" 
(" Measure for Measure," V. 1) : 

" His act did not o'ertake his bad intent ; 
And must be buried but as an intent 
That perished by the way : thoughts are no subjects. 
Intents but merely thoughts." 

These are the real facts : 

There (at Kirk of Field) Darnley had gone to bed an hour after the departure 
of the Queen. Alongside of him slept his old servant, "William Taylor ; two others, 
Thomas Nelson and Edward Simons, lay in the hall ; two grooms on the ground- 
floor next the bedroom sometimes occupied by the Queen. Between two and three 
o'clock in the morning an explosion took place. With a frightful report the house 
of the Prebendary Balfour flew into the air. 

The occurrences immediately before that hour are veiled by a darkness which 
will perhaps never be quite dispelled. If one reads the declarations of Hepburn 
and Hay, Bothwell remained with them to the last. At two o'clock, they say, they 
lighted the match, shut the doors behind them, and retired to where Bothwell stood 
some little distance off". They describe him as devoured with impatience ; they had 
to show him a window through which he could see the glimmering of the match ; 



38 JAMES HEPBURN, 

indeed, he wished, they say, as the explosion continued to delay, to go into the 
house; but Hepburn held him back. At last the so impatiently expected thunder 
shook the air and ground. Not until now, by their account, did Bothwell with his 
assistants and servants start upon their return to Edinburgh, in spite of many hin- 
drances soon reached his home, and,*after taking something to drink, laid himself 
down in bed with his wife. But it is scarcely possible that he accomplished the dis- 
tance (several (three) miles) on foot in so short a time as to have been in bed already 
half an hour, when those inhabiting Holyrood, startled from sleep by the tremendous 
report, got up ; and a court officer, who from terror could not speak a word, awoke 
him. Probably he, at the latest, left the Kirk of Field when the match was kindled. 

However this may be, the death of Darnley was not caused by the explosion, 
arranged by Bothwell ; and, also, the house could not have been so thoroughly de- 
stroyed as it was by the powder scattered about by Hepburn, Hay, and Ormistoun. 
Its complete ruin, extending to the very foundation walls, is to be explained by the 
mines dug and loaded — perhaps without BothweWs knowledge — by Maitland, Bal- 
four, and Archibald Douglas, which too took fire and exploded. 

But what was the end of Darnley ? His corpse, near that of his valet William 
Taylor, was found about five o'clock in the morning, under a tree, in an orchard, 
and about eighty yards (two hundred and forty feet) away from the house. Both 
bodies were entirely uninjured, no trace of wounds from burning or contusion. 
The King was clothed only with his shirt, — near him lay a fur coat and his slippers. 
Melvil mentions, in his memoirs, the story of a page, to the eff'ect that Darnley was 
attacked when asle«p, dragged out, and near a stable was strangled with a napkin. 
The Count Moretta, on the other hand, was of opinion that the King, woke up by 
the murderers moving about the house, and by the, creaking of the doors opened 
with false keys, in his shirt, and with the fur coat in his hand, tried to escape with 
Taylor through a door leading into the garden, but was held fast, strangled, and 
carried into the neighboring orchard. But one does not see why the murderers 
should have taken the trouble to bring both bodies so far from the house and over 
a wall, instead of abandoning them, with the other people in the house, to destruc- 
tion by the explosion. It seems, therefore, more natural to assume that Darnley 
and Taylor actually succeeded in escaping through the garden and in getting over 
the wall, but were pursued and strangled under the fruit-trees where they were 
found. In the excitement and confusion they were left lying there. 

The murderers of the King were neither Bothwell nor his three artificers ; but the 
greatest probability speaks for the contrary, — i.e., [implicates] Morton's representa- 
tive, the Castelhm of "VVhittingham, Archibald Douglas, with his servants John 
Binning and Thomas Gairner, the three men in slippers whom Powrie and Wilson 
met at Black-Friars. A slipper was found among the ruins and recognized as the 
one which, according to the declaratioji of Binning and Gairner, Archibald Doug- 
las had lost. Beside this, some women, living in the vicinity of the orchard, bore 
witness before the Privy Council that they heard a cry, " Ah, my brother, pity me 
for the love of Him who pities us all !" On the mother's side Darnlej' was a relation 
of Douglas. Other conspirators, too, were on the scene. Thus Binning thought 
that he recognized the voice of the Prebendary Robert Balfour among the masked 
persons whom he met on the street subsequent to the explosion ; whereupon John 
Maitland, Abbot of Coldingham, and brother of the Secretary of State, recommend- 
ing silence, closed his mouth. The women mentioned saw groups of eight and 
eleven persons go towards the city in the greatest haste. Drury, however, gives 
Cecil, on the 24th April, 15G7, from Berwick, the following details, which he proba- 
bly heard from Murray, who just before that date went to the continent by way of 
Berwick : " It was Ca)itain Cullen who gave the advice to make things more sure 
by strangling the King and not to rely on the powder onl}', a thing which, he as- 
serted, he had seen many a one escape. Sir Andrew Kerr (of Faudonside), had 
ridden to the place in order to help in the bloody deed, if necessary. It was a long 
time before the King died. He defended his life with all his strength." 



EARL OF BOTHWELL. 39 

The valet Nelson affords, in fact, the proof of the correctness of Cullen's re- 
mark, — he was pulled out of the ruins alive. 

Thus much is translated from Opitz, 1879. Bekker^ goes much 
more into details, with further proofs, and demonstrates and confirms 

8 Death of Darnley. By Dr. Ernest Bekker. — (The point) that neither Both- 
well nor his people took any personal share in the strangling of the King because 
the spot on which they were posted prevented their doing so, finds its confirmation 
in the extremely noteworthy fact that all of Both well's followers who were executed 
as murderers of the King declared before death repeatedly and in the most solemn 
manner that they had gone away from the Kirk of Field in the firm conviction 
that the King had perished in the explosion. The Laird of Grmistoun, who was 
not present at the explosion, relates in his deposition that he also had no other idea 
than that the King was buried under the ruins of the house, and that he had in the 
most careful manner questioned Hay and Hepburn, as well as all the others of Both- 
well's people who were that night at the Kirk of Field, concerning the killing of 
the King, and that they all swore to him that they had never supposed anything 
else than that the King was killed by the explosion. These men said the same thing 
in full view of death, and, singularly enough, this declaration has not been altered, 
though it was so damaging ; for it follows from it, first, that Bothwell and his peo- 
ple were at a spot where they could hear nothing of what was happening in the 
garden situated to the south of the court; second, that this spot cannot possibly 
have been other than the Thief Kaw (the wynd beside the Black-Friars,— deposi- 
tion of Dalgleish of the 3d January, 1568), for at every other spot behind the city 
wall any one could, and must, hear what took place at eighty paces distance from 
the house. 

Bothwell's people knew nothing because, in accordance with the orders of their 
master, they watched or guarded the Thief Kaw, at a considerable distance from the 
garden, and in addition were separated from the place of the murder by the high 
city wall. Hay and Hepburn for their part could at first know nothing more about 
the murder, because that during this time they were with Bothwell in the cellar 
attending to the powder. 

Not the Earl of Bothwell, but others must have strangled the King. Circum- 
stances prove that he had the special charge of conducting the explosion and of 
watching the house on that side from which alone the powder could be taken into 
the cellar, so that he with his six companions was divided from the scene of the 
murder by the town wall. But independent of this, it was utterly impossible that 
Bothwell could carry out such an undertaking alone. Would the Scottish nobility, 
who in the sixteenth century possessed a great mastery of organizing and carrying 
out conspiracies, have committed the execution of such an uncommonly risky enter- 
prise to a single noble with six followers? In case things did not go well it might 
come to a desperate struggle, in which the King with his six servants might defend 
himself successfully. Could the chiefs of the Scottish nobility, and especially the 
chiefs of the conspiracy, the cunning Maitland, Argyle, Huntley, Morton, Murray, 
and James Balfour, be so foolish as not to take the most extreme measures of pre- 
caution in an undertaking whose failure would ruin them in life and property? 
Could they, the actual originators and plotters of the murder, sleep quietly on that 
night in which either the life of the King was to be oflTered up or in which their own 
lives, in case of a miscarriage or discovery, would fall into the deadliest danger? 
These questions must be answered with a decided negative, and the result shows that 
all provisionary measures which could render miscarriage impossible were attended 
to. 

Matter-of-fact proofs and clues showing that yet other highly-placed personages 
participated in the murder are to be found in abundance in the material on hand, 
but they have been as little collected as those which show that the Earl of Bothwell 



40 JAMES HEPBURN, 

his German confrb'e of the pen. He wrote as late as 1881, with still 
more published evidence for his guidance. 

This clearly exonerates Botlnvell of everything but the intent ; in 

with a couple of assistants neither did nor could have carried out this daring act 
alone. 

William Powrie says in his deposition that at one time, with Wilson, at the 
unlading of the powder, he met Paris with two masked persons ; a certain proof 
that there were yet other suspicious persons who went about the Kirk of Field on 
that night. On his second hearing Powrie said that, as they brought the last load 
of powder, Bothwell came to him in company with three others who wore cloaks 
and silk overshoes. It is out of the question, however, that Bothwell should have 
been present at the unlading of the powder, since he was, precisely at this time, 
with the other Lords paying a visit to the King. This declaration of Powrie has in 
any case been tampered with. Powrie can only have seen those three persons with 
Bothwell when the latter went a second time to the Kirk of Field for the purpose 
of giving the order for lighting the match. And that these three wore silk over- 
shoes shows that they were noble, perhaps Lords, for silk overshoes were at that 
time, in Scotland, only worn by the nobility, and especially by those among them 
who lived at Court. 

In exact correspondence with these declarations is the confession of John Bin- 
ning, a servant of Archibald Douglas, in the year 1581, before his execution as 
a regicide. In the memorable fragment of Binning's confession it is said that A. 
Douglas with his servants, Binning and Gairner, went to the Kirk of Field for 
the purpose of performing the deed. Archibald had on silk overshoes, and when he 
came in changed his clothes, which were covered with mud and dirt. Binning, who 
was sent to Throplow's Wynd, undoubtedly to look after the other murderers, who 
were hastening home, met certain masked men, among whom he thought he recog- 
nized the voice of Kobert Balfour. There came also John Maitland, Abbot of 
Coldingham, and brother of the Secretary', who gave Binning a sign to keep silence 
by laying his hand upon his (own) mouth. 

Douglas was covered with mud and dirt when he came home. Thus he could 
not have been if he were a mere looker-on, but only if he, possibly, had stumbled 
in the flight or had taken part in a fight. The former is possible, the last certain. 
A fight of desperation took place between the murderers on one side, and the King, 
with his page, Taylor, on the other side. But more of this, as also of the masked 
men, farther on. 

Another account as regards the murderers who fled towards the city comes 
from two women who woke up, in a fright, at the fearful report and rushed out of 
doors. Both deposed at their examination that they had counted nineteen per- 
sons who were running in the direction of the town. One of these women, Mag. 
Crockat, tried in vain to stop one of the fugitives, who had on a silken garment, 
and was therefore one of the courtiers. 

The Earl of Murray, who not long after the murder of the King set off for 
France, had (on his way thither, during his stay in London) an interview with the 
Spanish Ambassador, de Silva, during which he informed the ambassador that there 
were thirty to forty persons, in one way or another, mixed up in the murder. Mur- 
ray here does not reckon himself among the guilty, as Morton also, at a later period, 
according to the peculiar ideas of the Scottish nobility, did not reckon himself. By 
the guilty he meant, not those privy to the conspiracy, but those who took an active 
part in it; and among these, again, especially those who were present at the act of 
murder. Further, Murray probably did not intend in his thirty to forty persons 
to include servants and subordinate actors of lower rank, but the nobles among the 
conspirators, for he speaks of the " guilty parties." Among the conspirators were 
the murderers of Riccio. The condition on which Murray, Maitland, Athol, Argyle, 



EARL OF BOTHWELL. 41 

this he was no more guilty than Murray, Morton, and a number of 
others the highest in rank, position, and influence. Murray, the hypo- 
crite, was just as guilty in respect to intent as Bothwell, and before an 

Huntley, and Bothwell promised to use their influence for their pardon on account 
of Kiccio's murder was their joining the conspiracy against the King's life ; and as 
we have seen, Morton, his friends, and followers at Newcastle, joyfully acceded to 
the " hond" of Craigmillar. The murderers of Kiccio hore a deadly hatred to Darn- 
ley as a traitor, and one of them, who, in December, 1566, had not been pardoned, 
Ker of Faudonside, put freedom and life at stake in order to feast his eyes upon 
the murder of the King. He rode in the night — 9th-10th February — with several 
companions to that suburb of Edinburgh, and after having seen the explosion, re- 
turned back again to the Border. If a banished Riccio-murderer risked this, one 
may conclude that the returned ones were ready to do it, particularly as they were 
actual conspirators. This one circumstance points at something which, considering 
the preceding circumstances, is more than probable. 

Kirk of Field lay in the suburb. Since, now, without the slightest doubt, the 
house was surrounded on all sides, the supposition is very ready that the murderers 
of the King did not, all of them, approach it from the city, but that also a part came 
thither from the country ; for one could reach the house quite as easily, perhaps 
more easily, from this last direction as from the city, and one was much less likely 
to be noticed. A body of horsemen on their way to the chief city attracted no 
attention, it was a common object. 

The instance of Ker of Faudonside proves on the one hand that the death- 
hour of the King was exactly known to the individual members of the wide-branch- 
ing conspiracy, and allows one to conclude with certainty, on the other hand, that 
if, beside this Faudonside, other nobles had come from the country to the Kirk of 
Field, they did this, not merely as idle spectators to quench their thirst for revenge 
with the murder-scene, but also with the definite purpose of investing the Kirk of 
Field on this side (South and East), and in case of need themselves pushing in. It 
is possible that Murray's sudden leaving of Edinburgh on the 9th February was 
connected with this circumstance, and did not come simply from the intention of 
diverting from himself a suspicion of participation in the murder. 

It cannot be doubted from the adduced facts that the murder of Darnley, ex- 
actly as the murder of Kiccio, was carried out by a great number of persons, and 
that the subsequent, commonly accepted, story that Bothwell, with a few subordi- 
nate assistants of the lower rank, accomplished a wildly desperate adventure is 
simply laughable. . . . The fact is entirely lost or forgotten or out of sight that a 
conspiracy of the highest magnates of the state, and of nearly all the Calvinistic 
nobles, had been formed in December, 1566, and January, 1567, with the closest 
secrecy and entirely independent. . . . 

Binning's confession shows that Archibald Douglas, John Maitland, the 
brother of the Secretary, and Robert Balfour, the brother of James Balfour, took 
part in the murder. But these were not the only ones. It is almost certain that 
the above-named pair of brothers were with Argyle at the Kirk of Field on that 
night, and Huntley's participation is quite certain. 

When Bothwell took his trusted servant Paris into the secret, he said, amono- 
many other things, " I have Lethington, who is considered one of the best heads in 
this country, and who is the manager of the whole. Besides, there are in the aflfair 
my brother-in-law Argyle, Huntley, Morton, Ruthven, and Lindsay." The three 
last named were not then in Edinburgh, but probably the three first were, and, as 
we have seen, were at the noticeable visit to the Kirk of Field on the evening of 
the 9th of February. 

That Maitland should be called the " manager of the whole" agrees exactly 
with his conduct at Craigmillar, where he showed himself with Murray as properly 

5 



42 JA3IES HEPBURN, 

English or a New Jersey judge and jury would have been held as 
amenable. In New York, where the application of the law has de- 
generated so low as to make angels weep, Murray might have escaped 

the originator and maker of the conspiracy. It also agrees with the circumstance 
that Maithmd recommended the house of Robert Balfour, in the Kirk of Field, to 
the Queen, and indicates that the whole plan of the murder sprang from his brain. 

Again we have another piece of testimony, from which his guilt, indirectly, 
appears. When JMorton, at the end of 1572, became Kegent, Maitland, who then 
was a warm partisan of the Queen, protested, in a memorial to the new Regent, 
against being declared an outlaw " for a crime whereof he (Morton) knoweth in his 
conscience I was as innocent as himself." Morton answered in the following remark- 
able way: " That I know him innocent in my conscience as myself, the contrary 
thereof is true, for I was and am innocent thereof, but could not affirm the same of 
him, considering what I understand in that matter of his own confession to myself 
of before." 

Laing thinks that Morton alludes to the negotiations which took place between 
Maitland, Both well, and Morton, at Wliittinghara, on the 20tli of January, 1567. 
This cannot be. At that time either one of the three named was as guilty as 
the others, since the murder was not yet perpetrated. It is said that Morton was 
persuaded at "Whittingham to take part in the murder, which he had previously 
refused to do because the promised written assent of the Queen could not be pro- 
cured. The Earl of Morton had the same idea of " guilty" that Murray had in talk- 
ing with de Silva. He did not reckon those who concealed a crime, but the actual 
perpetrators only, as really guilty ; he means\by the words " by his own confession 
to myself of before" not a conference before the murder, but a confession concern- 
ing the commission of it. It was the words "of before" which led Laing into 
error. "Without any reason he thinks this "earlier" must mean before the 9th of 
Februar}', 1567, and forgets that Morton spoke these words towards the end of 1572. 
This nice distinction which Morton makes between his participation and that of 
Maitland allows of but one interpretation, — i.e., that Morton had it from Maitland's 
owji mouth that he was present at the carrying out of the crime, and was not, like 
Morton, simply privy to and a concealer and an abettor of the murder. 

The participation of the Earl of Huntley in the murder is fully substantiated. 
" As Bothwell," says Paris, " was about to go the second time to the Kirk of Field, 
Huntley, with two or three servants, came to him in his chamber. After they had 
whisjiered a great deal the visitor left, and Bothwell said to Paris, who stood near, 
that Huntley had offered to accompany them, but he did not wish to take him." 
Huntley was nevertheless at the Kirk of Field that night. Therefore, either the 
wording of this declaration of Paris has been falsified, or Bothwell said this in 
order not to expose his friend before the servant. 

Archibald Douglas, already mentioned as one of the murderers, told Morton, 
after the deed was completed, that he was present at the murder, and went with 
Huntley and Bothwell to the Kirk of Field. 

Undoubtedly Huntley and Douglas were two of those three unnamed noble- 
men in mantles and silk overshoes whom Powrie at one time saw with Bothwell, 
and in any case upon the way to the Kirk of Field. Powrie certainly says, on his 
second hearing, that the same persons came to Bothwell during the unlading of the 
powder, — a lie, which is confuted by the deposition of Morton, and also, as already 
remarked, by the fact that these Lords, during the time the powder was put into 
the cellar, were making a visit to the King. 

According to the deposition of Dalgleish, Bothwell, after the explosion, hastened 
as quickly as possible to his apartments, and, in order to awaken no suspicion, went 
to bed immediately. He had been there but a short time when a certain George 
Hacket entered the chamber for the purpose of telling him the shocking news of 



EABL OF BOTHWELL. 4a 

because he was an available candidate and expert in political expe- 
diency. He was like an experienced burglar who "puts up the job," 
watches around the corner while the crime is being committed, and 

the murder of the King. With this declaration Powrie's and Hepburn's deposi- 
tions exactly agree, with the diiference that the latter adds that Huntley also 
came immediately to Bothwell, and the former, that not alone Huntley, but also 
others appeared in the room, and that they all, from thence, betook themselves to 
the apartments of the Queen. These others, then, whose names Powrie, unhappily, 
has not mentioned, were noblemen, without doubt the leagued-lords, and among 
them Argyle and Maitland, who, as was usual with the bearers of high offices in 
Scotland, and just as did Bothwell and Huntley, lived in the royal palace. 

This highly suspicious circumstance allows of only two explanations. If 
individual chiefs of the conspiracy remained that night behind in the palace, they 
knew what the detonation signified, but at the same time they could only guess 
about when the leaders of the undertaking would have got back to the palace ; 
exactly when they could not know, since the murderers, in any case, were careful 
to get back to their apartments as secretly and as unnoticed as possible. 

The meeting of the conspiring Lords in Bothwell's room, shortly after his re- 
turn to the palace, is so striking that it may be explained by another yet more appa- 
rent conjecture. The Lords hit the time, when Bothwell had slipped home to his 
chamber, so precisely, because that, generally, they themselves could get there no 
sooner, having been at the Kirk of Field, as we know with certainty concerning 
Huntley. 

Of the three in mantles and silk overshoes, whom Powrie saw with Bothwell 
upon the way to the Kirk of Field, two were Huntley and Archibald Douglas. 
Among the masked men ("certain mussilit men") whom Binning mentions was 
the brother of the advocate— J. Balfour, — John Maitland, the brother of the Secre- 
tary, came undisguised. The question is, who was that third nobleman of Powrie's, 
and who were the other masked men whom Binning saw? A noble murderer him- 
self gives the answer (the already often mentioned Archibald Douglas), in his 
well-known, but yet little studied letter to Mary Stuart in ShefBeld during the 
year 158L 

"The murder," writes Douglas, " was (done or executed) carried out by these 
persons, and took place at the command of those among the nobility who signed 
the league for this object;" that is to say, not alone Bothwell and Huntley, but 
also Argyle, Maitland, and James Balfour took part in the bloody work at the 
Kirk of Field. That third person was therefore Argyle. 

"What Douglas here writes is corroborated in fullest measure by other accounts. 
When the Laird Hay of Talla was imprisoned in September, 1567, he accused not 
only Huntley as a leader in the murder, but a great number of the most prominent 
Lords. 

About Christmas, 1567, a number of Bothwell's people were taken prisoners in 
the Orkneys, as we are told, twelve or fifteen. Laing doubts this account, which 
we owe to Archbishop Beaton. He thinks that because in January, 1568, there 
were but four of Bothwell's people executed, there could not have been such a 
number of prisoners, especially since John Hepburn of Bolton was the only one 
among them guilty (of the murder). 

The Earl of Morton, previous to his execution, named only Bothwell, Huntley, 
and Archibald Douglas as actually committing the murder. When he was asked 
concerning the other actors, he said, "I know none and will accuse none." Proof 
enough that he who through his whole life was one of the most tricky enemies of 
the Queen could very well have named others in addition. 

It then stands established that Bothwell could not have singly carried out the 
murder, and also did not thus carry it out alone. 



44 JA3IES HEPBURN, 

appropriates the best portion of the phinder. He counseled with the 
conspirators as to getting rid of Darnley, got out of the way when their 
plans were to be carried into execution, and he gave Both well a ban- 
Thus viewed the confession of Binning unrolls quite another picture of the 
murder, with the mimes of other murderers. Binning names not a Hay, Hepburn 
Powrie, etc., but Archibald Douglas, John IMaitland, Robert Balfour. Perhaps he, 
also, named other murderers of high standing, a circumstance which we owe to the 
probably fragmentary character of his confession. The servant of Douglas could 
name no other persons because he, with his master, Huntley, and the rest, stood 
on the other side of the city wall. Now it was on this side where Huntley, the 
Maitlands, the Balfours, Douglas, and in any case Argyle, also, stood that Darnley 
was strangled. Bothwell, on the contrary, had, from the other side of the city wall, 
gone into the cellar and examined the powder which Hay and Hepburn were guard- 
ing, while his four other servants stood at the point of commencement of the " Thief 
Eaw." These circumstances, as already remarked, give the only clue to the fact 
that all Bothwell's people, both immediately after the murder (when questioned) by 
Ormistoun, and also at a later period, in the presence of death, declared, in the 
most solemn manner, that they hastened away from the Kirk of Field under the 
firm conviction that the King had been killed by the explosion. 

Precisely in the fact, that this most important declaration of the unfortunate 
tools of Bothwell appears with the most perfect agreement in the depositions, lies 
the best guaranty for its truthfulness. The judges of these men had acted much 
more wisely if, instead of disfiguring their depositions by plump contradictions, or 
forcing them to false declarations by the rack, as is the case with the second depo- 
sition of Paris, they had thrown the strangling of the King directly upon Bothwell 
and his people. This the secret tribunal, which consisted of Morton, Maitland, 
Argyle, Huntley, and James Balfour, did not do ; and this, perhaps, in order to make 
the mystery of this murder still more mysterious, by directing suspicion upon Both- 
well only. But, perhaps, also from the fear that exasperation at too audacious lying 
might bring the other yet living murderers, or the friends of Bothwell, or perhaps 
Bothwell himself, some day to expose the true relation of things. Certain it is that 
the regicides entertained this fear when the Calvinistic noble party split. They 
accused each other mutually (that is, the two parties) of the murder of the King, 
but no one of the accusers (Argyle, Huntley, Murray, Maitland, James Balfour, 
etc.) dared to raise up the veil which lay over the commission of the deed ; for had 
any one of those named done so he must have, always, feared that the accusa- 
tion of a personal participation in the act of murdering the King would excite the 
accused to prove the same against the accuser. Each one preferred to pass as a 
member of the conspiracy in order not himself to be named as one of the actual per- 
petrators. 

As regards the manner of the murder, this one explanation can alone appear 
trustworthy, according to the foregoing facts, namely, that Darnley or his page 
Taylor heard suspicious noises, or possibly, by chance, saw unaccustomed figures 
stealin" about at the Kirk of Field. That in an attempt at flight through the neigh- 
borin"- "-ardens they ran into the hands of a group of murderers, who were lurking 
about under the leading of Huntley, of Balfour, or of the jNIaitlands, and of Archi- 
bald Douglas. Without doubt, the short struggle then took place, during which 
the Kin"- shouted those cries for help which were heard by some women in the 
neighborhood ; and also, perhaps, the mud and dirt which covered the clothing of 
Archibald Douglas came from his participation in this struggle with the King and 
his page. 

Of the other explanations, that one which Laing (chap, vii.) and Hume (chap, 
jxiv.) represent, viz., " the King and his page were thrown eighty ells by the ex- 



EARL OF BOTHWELL. 45 

qnet, in his own house, when the miserable boy-king was a corpse. If 
disinterested and impartial men of ability ever rewrite the history of this 
time, Murray will not stand forth as a model worthy of imitation, any 
more than some political magnates in this country who have learned to 
pull the wires and command the " bar'ls" of their accomplices and 
dupes. Murray was a character which is not confined to his era. It 
is "for all time." Bothwell was a man of his own time, impossible at 

plosion, without being sinf,'ed," is simply laughable. A second, which Hosack (i. 
268) mentions, along with the onl}' true one, maintains, on the ground of a letter of 
W. Drury, is, that the King and his page Taylor were first strangled in the cham- 
ber, and then carried out of doors. This is quite as untenable, for, apart from the 
consideration that such a murder scene in the house would have woke up the ser- 
vants, the murderers, in a business so pressing for haste, would hardly have taken 
the trouble to drag the bodies of the murdered eighty ells away from the house in 
the garden. The circumstance that the fur mantle and slippers of the King, as also 
some pieces of clothing belonging to Taylor, were lying not far from the corpses, 
proves that these articles were hurriedly taken up at the flight, and in the struggle 
were torn from them or lost; for to assume that the pieces of clothing which the 
murdered persons had on were not strewed about the garden until after the struggle 
would be contrary to sense. 

Thus the King Henry was murdered, a sacrifice to the Calvinistic nobles-party 
to the revenge of the Riccio murderers, as well as to his own disrespectful behavior 
to the magnates of Scotland, with whom ho should rather have sought sympathy 
and reconciliation than to show them, on every opportunity, his hatred and distrust. 
His murderers were the verj' persons who, on a ceremonious visit, laughing and 
flattering, surrounded him on the evening of the 9th February, 1567. They were 
those who, a few hours later, in the same night, entered the apartment of his wife 
with signs of the deepest condolence. 

Let us now, in conclusion, review the results so far attained, which we must 
keep steadily in sight for what follows. 

It results from certain reports which were written in the year 1566, and in the 
Immediate surroundings of the Queen, that the position of isolation Avhich Darnley 
assumed at that time, in respect to the Court, was a consequence, not of the hatred 
which his Consort is said to have thrown upon him, but a consequence of his enmity 
towards and his mistrust of the royal ministry. Darnlej^ had a deadly anxiety lest 
his yielding wife should some day yield to the pressure of lier ministers and amnesty 
the banished murderers of Eiccio, whom he had so shamefully betraj^ed. It is most 
important for us that these things are confessed by the royal ministers themselves 
in a long account, dated 8th October, 1566, to Catharine de Medici, and it is quite 
as important that the Earls Huntley and Argyle, two of the King's murderers, at a 
later period declared, in a protest against Murraj''s usurped Regency, that the death 
of Darnley had been determined oji by the chief of the nobility (the royal minister) 
at Craigmillar, because Darnley stood in the waj"^ of the pardon of the Riccio mur- 
derers. Out of the conspiracy of the ministers grew a great conspiracy of the 
Nobility. 

Darnley was, like Riccio, a sacrifice to the Calvinistic nobles. 

The murder of the King was eminently a political deed. The King was mur- 
dered by those who, from political reasons, had determined on his death at Craig- 
millar, but with the assistance and joint knowledge of a very great part of the 
nobles. Bothwell passed afterwards for the only murderer, simply because his 
share in the murder was the most certainly known, and because the material 
which furnishes the connected history of the aflTair had not been at all at any time 
critically examined. 



46 JA3IES HEPBURN, 

later dates; and yet, nevertheless, in many respects, far superior to his 
surroundings. 

In the night-time, and then only, placards were posted, and lament- 
ing voices Avere heard, which, amid the darkness, proclaimed Bothwell 
and Mary guilty of the murder of Darnley. Since these originated 
with the faithless Morton, the principal accomplice in the crime, it was 
treachery towards Bothwell, and a breach of the agreement or "Bond," 
and a lie in so far as he, instead of naming himself, accused Mary Stuart, 
of whose participation in it — whatever her share in it, more or less, may 
have been — he could know noticing. Bothwell, enraged at this, swore 
to wash his hands in the blood of the slanderer if he could ferret him 
out. At all events the Earl was brave enough personally to press for 
an inquiry, and, in the Privy Council, sufficiently bold to sign the order 
for legal proceedings against himself. As a consequence, on the 12th 
April, he was declared free from this suspicion by a court which was 
composed princi{)ally of men privy to the murder, — a tribunal of which 
the proceedings have, with justice^ always been regarded as a sheer 
comedy. 

It should, however, never be forgotten, that if the proceedings were 
unjust, the blame is not to be laid upon Mary Stuart, since her Privy 
Council had drawn up the form of procedure exactly so that this result 
miglit follow, and the whole nobility, at that time, agreed with the 
Council ; nay, more, the whole Parliament immediately ratified their 
decision. Only Murray got out of the affair by setting off for France 
three days previously thereto. After this events pressed on in more and 
more rapid succession, hastened by Bothwell's bold and unrestrained 
energy. All, Mary among them, acted like puppets under the influence of 
his powerful personality . To Huntley his estates were restored as the 
price of his sister's divorce from Botlnvell. 

The 19th April, at the closing of the Parliament, almost the whole 
of the nobility (under compulsion, as they afterwards maintained, — an 
hundred men by one) signed in the Ainsley Tavern a declaration that 
they were convinced of Bothwell's innocence; that they would defend 
him against every slanderer ; and recommended him as the most worthy 
husband for the Queen. 

If the Queen did not accede to Bothwell's urging that she should 
marry him at once, this may not have been from disinclination, but be- 
cause she wished to defer the union for a little longer time for the sake 
of decency. He, however, in the feverish haste of disquietude, espe- 
cially because he knew that any delay foreboded danger, determined to 
compel events by audacity, and, with her consent, bear her off on the 
24th of April to his castle at Dunbar. This plan was carried out, and, 
after proceedings hastily instituted, the divorce between himself and his 
M'ife was declared on the 3d and 7th of JNIay, and he married the Queeu 



EARL OF BOTHWELL. 47 

on the 15th of May, having been first raised to the dignity of Duke of 
Orkney. All this was done in perfect understanding with the entire 
nobility. There is something wild in this extreme haste, yet it should 
not be ascribed to Mary but to Bothvvell. The consciousness and the 
consequences of his action impelled him energetically forward. Darn- 
ley's murder had been consummated in order to put aside a phantom 
King in perfect understanding with the " vast majority" of the highest 
aristocracy. Perhaps from patriotism Both well expected to rescue the 
country from boundless confusion, and alas ! as the result proved, he 
had only hastened to confirm it. 

Thus Bothwell had now become Consort of the Queen and Lord of 
the land. He stood so high that no one approached near to him. Did 
he now entertain a wish to ascend still higher, and, over the body of 
the infant prince, to open the way to the throne for himself or his de- 
scendants ? His enemies maintain that this was so. He certainly wished 
to get possession of the Prince. Was this with an evil design f There is 
not the smallest positive proof or indioatlon to justify such an idea. In 
any case he was already master, and lorded it only too energetically, 
but his highest degree of elevation is also the extreme turning-point, 
the high-tide mark of his henceforth swiftly ebbing fortune. Having 
completed his structure, the building founded on a rotten basis had to 
break up and fall to pieces. His very commanding nature hastened the 
catastrophe. Who knows if the other nobility, his betrayers, could have 
possibly thrown him down if he had bought himself powerful friends 
by bribing or paying them with property confiscated from his enemies, 
as was the rule of the times, or if he had become their obedient insiru- 
ment, the tool of a PARTY and not the imi)erious master of his class, all 
classes ? The Scots wanted nothing resembling a real King or ruler, and 
least of all an illegitimate one. Bothwell labored under the fatal error 
of believing he could use an irregularly acquired authority for good 
purposes. Doubtless he foreboded evil without knowing whence it 
would come. Suspicion must have entered his mind. He could not 
have entirely deluded himself into the belief he was to enjoy his acqui- 
sitions in peace, yet he was not meanly cunning enough to make out 
what actually did threaten him. Hence his disquiet, his dark, gloomy 
spirit, which was not natural to him, and this clearly explains — in con- 
nection with the jealousy inseparable from absorbing love — his apparent 
harshness to Mary after the marriage. 

The storm broke suddenly, foreseen but not expected, and surprising 
him when it did come. Already between the 20th and 26tli of May 
conferences of the nobles had taken place, with the object of dethron- 
ing the Queen and crowning James VI., who was but a year old. 
They soon signed a "Bond" against Mary and Bothwell. Lord 
Hume, Bothwell's old enemy, was to lead off. Liberton, in Midlothian, 
was indicated as the rendezvous for the 8th or 9th of June, and all 



48 JA3Ii:S HEPBURN, 

this occurred before Bothwell had even demanded the surrender of the 
Prince, whom the Earl of Mar guarded in Stirling. Tliis is the best 
proof that Bothwell's foes hnoiolngly maintained a falsehood when they 
averred that they rose only on account of BothiveWs demand for (lie custody 
of the year-old Prince and solely to protect the royal infant. In one 
word, the party which elevated Bothwell, — that is, the party of his old 
enemies, — the false Murray, the foul Morton, ce fin renard, to use the 
most expressive phrase of Henry IV., Lethington, let him fall, and he 
fell. In the early part of June the Lords of the Border, Hume, Ker, 
Ferneherst, set themselves in motion. Bothwell issued a proclamation 
arainst them. Few resorted to his banners. The inhabitants of 
Edinburgh showed a dangerous discontent, so he departed in haste 
with Mary on the 6th June, 1567, for the purpose of going to Both- 
wick and collecting troops, leaving Edinburgh Castle in the hands of 
the double-dyed traitor Sir James Balfour. The City at once received 
Morton and the hostiles. That old wily conspirator was at the head, 
and, according to his party watch-word, the Queen was to be set at 
liberty. From whom ? From her husband chosen by the very 
"Bond" now arrayed themselves against him and accepted by her? 
Bothwell had directed his levies to rendezvous at Melrose on the 15tli 
June against the rebellious Borderers. The insurgents hoped to 
anticipate the royal rising. They surrounded Borthwick Castle in 
hopes of taking the Royal Pair, but Bothwell escaped, and somewhat 
later the Queen. She flew to rejoin her husband, and both took refuge 
in Dunbar. The insurgents, however, did not pursue, but first made 
sure of Edinburgh, and issued a proclamation on the 11th June that 
the Queen should be separated from Bothwell. Some faithful adhe- 
rents at the same time gathered around her, — from two thousand to 
two thousand five hundred men. Here, again. Fate seemed to offer 
a solution. Had Mary delayed a few days, even her worst enemies 
admit the Bond against her would have dissolved of itself. But it was 
not to be. Bothwell's boldness precipitated the event. He thought 
only of conquering by force, but at Carberry Hill they came upon the 
enemy in greater force, double in numbers to his own. The trooj>s were 
spiritless, the Queen undecided, Bothwell ardently wished a duel with 
Morton, who evaded it. In the hoary traitor's stead Lord Lindsay 
presented himself. The Queen forbade the meeting. The negotiations 
of the French ambassador, the promises of the knightly (so esteemed, 
but erroneously, as events proved) Kirkaldy of Grange, determined the 
Queen to give herself up, with full confidence, into the hands of the 
conspirators. Bothwell hastened away, accompanied by a few trusty 
adherents, under an understanding (as is asserted by his detractors) 
with the enemy. How these latter kept their promises and sent the 
Queen on the second day afterwards into prison at Lochleven, and 
forced her to abdicate and later to fly into England, is well known. 



EARL OF BOTHWELL. 49 

It is the especial business of this consideration to follow out, with ex- 
actness, the final fate of Bothwell. 

The facts are manifoldly distorted; they envelop Bothwell like 
the opaque mists evoked by a magician, and in them this important 
personage again sinks into deep obscurity. 

That the conspirators did not at once pursue and get him into their 
power may seem astonishing, but they knew that he had not followers 
enough to make him dangerous, and they did not care to take him at 
once. He might have brought too many things to light. However, 
they concluded on the 16th a new "Bond" for the prosecution of the 
Earl of Bothwell. Sir James Balfour, his immediate assistant in the 
undertaking, and the actual deviser of the plan for the murder of 
Darnley, now again threw in his lot among them and joined in their 
faithless desio-ii. Bothwell for reasons unknown left Dunbar, put to 
sea and fled to the North, and was finally forced by Fate into Den- 
mark, where he died in prison. The particulars of this flight, how- 
ever, have always been given in a very brief and unsatisfactory manner. 
Let us first hear Robertson : 

" Bothwell fled to the Bishop of Murray, then to the Orkney Islands. Escaping 
thence with few followers he fell into the utmost need, and was forced into a kind 
of life which increased his infamy. He practiced piracy. Kirkland of Grange and 
Murray of Tullibardine being sent against him with some ships, surprised him as 
he lay at anchor. He was beaten, and with one ship fled to Norway. On the coast 
of this country he attacked a vessel. The Norwegians came to its relief, and, after 
a desperate fight, he and his companions were taken and treated as pirates. It was 
only from his being recognized that he was spared the death to which his com- 
panions were condemned. He died in prison, after ten years' confinement, having 
sunk at last into deep despondency and aberration of mind." 

The true and false is here mingled in the most wonderful manner. 
According to this account, Bothwell died in the year 1577. Chalmers 
gives the year 1576, and many agree with him, but it is incontestable 
that he died in 1575, eight years after his flight. In proof of this, on 
the 24th November, 1575, Danzay, the French ambassador of Henry 
III., in Copenhagen, adds, after he has announced the death of the 
Danish Chancellor, Peder Oxe, who died on the 24th October, "and 
the Earl of Bothwell, a Scotchman, is also deceased." ^ 

Besides this particular misrepresentation, Robertson's narrative is 
full of errors, accidental or willful. In fact, it has no chronology. 
This is owing perhaps to the very fact that it is founded on the false- 
hoods of Buchanan and Melvil, which have no basis whatever of truth, 
only of virulent consistent defamation. 

It is particularly important to ascertain how long Bothwell re- 
mained in the Scottish waters, and when he was imprisoned in Den- 
mark. If Danish Archives did not help to throw light upon the story, 

5 This dispatch is for the first time published in " iS'ya Hmidlinga)- rorande 
Skandinaviens historia Stockholm," 1824, xi., but it is almost totally unknown. 



50 JAMES HEPBURN, 

all would remain shrouded in darkness. Happily, these offer many 
pieces of information, M'hich, however, have never yet been published 
in connection, and which only became perfectly accessible to Dr. Phil 
A. Petrick because the Keeper of the Archives of the King of Den- 
mark, Privy Conference Counsellor, Dr. Wegener, had the kindness to 
send him, a few years since, a full collection of all the judicial pro- 
cesses, printed and unprinted, then lying in the Royal Danish Archives. 
To him. Dr. Wegener, as well as to his Excellency the German ambas- 
sador to Denmark, Heydebrand, and von de Lasa, especial thanks are 
due for similar assistance. 

Especially valuable are the Minutes of the First Hearing that was 
given to Bothwell before the law officers at Bergen, — first published by 
Bergenhammer, in the translation of the History of Mary Stuart by von 
Gentz, Copenhagen, 1803. 

This is of 23d September, 15G7. His capture cannot have occurred 
long before. Only three months, therefore, have to be accounted for. 
First of all, Bothwell sailed between 30th June and 7th July with 
some (three or five) ships to the North, without being immediately fol- 
lowed {i.e., he was not pursued until after the Outlawry of 26th June), 
accompanied by Lord Hay of Tallow, John Hepburn, and Bartoun, — 
who were subsequently executed 3d January, 1568, — Dalgleish, French 
Paris, and William Murray. Inch Keith was surrendered at the same 
time to the insurgents, but Dunbar held out to the 1st September. 
Bothwell could probably have made himself secure in the latter fortress, 
but he felt himself more free and safer on the high seas. He felt like 
the Douglas of old, " I would rather hear the lark sing (the sea-gull 
shriek) than the mouse squeak." At first he repaired to his great-uncle, 
Patrick Hepburn, Bishop of Murray, and passed a while at Spynis 
Castle, near Elgin. Christopher Rokesby, an English spy, proposed to 
Elizabeth's agent, Throckmorton, to murder Bothwell. Throckmorton 
referred him to the personally unprincipled Morton. 

He was also with the Earl of Huntley at Strawboggyn in order 
to induce him to take up arms. He did not succeed in rousing his 
brother-in law. Bothwell then hastened on to his Dukedom of Ork- 
ney. Here also treachery was predominant. His own vassal, Gilbert 
Balfour, brother of the Edinburgh traitor, Sir James Balfour, the real 
author of Darnley's murder, denied him entrance into his own Castle of 
Kirkwall. Things had now become perilous for him. Bothwell had 
to leave the Orkneys and endeavor to maintain himself in Shetland. 
He was still master of the sea. If Murray is to be believed he issued 
letters of marque; but only a blind enemy, not an impartial searcher 
after truth, can see pii-acy in this. A state of war existed, and, 
formally viewed, Bothwell's side of the question was the best, since he 
was not only Consort of the Queen and Duke of the Orcades, or Ork- 
neys, but also Hereditary High Admiral of Scotland. Thus he stood 



UARL OF BOTHWELL. 51 

with threefold strength in his own proper right. Whether about this 
time he attacked some hostile ships of his opponents is not known, but 
if he did do so he acted in accordance with the laws of Avar. He 
spared foreigners. There is yet existing in the Danish Archives the 
contract which Bothwell concluded ou the 15th August, 15G7, in the 
Harbor of '' Upt Ness," near Sumborough Head, in Shetland, with the 
Bremen skipper, Gerdt Hcmelengk, whom he found there with his 
vessel, the " Pelican." This he hired for two months at fifty crowns a 
month. This hiring or chartering is not contradicted, but corroborated 
by the Certificate of Olav Sinclair, Treasurer of Shetland, to Gerdt 
Hemelengk, made out the 15th September, to the effect that nothing 
had been paid up to that time. Moreover, the })etition of Hemelengk 
to the Burgomaster and Council of Bremen, 3d March, 1568, states 
expressly that the Scottish Lord had induced — not compelled — him to 
sell his ship or to hire it out for two months. Such transactions are 
not the proceedings of a pirate. 

The fio-ht between Bothwell and Tullibardiue and Kirkakly is the 
more correctly to be assigned to the last days of August, since, prob- 
ably, in consequence of the result of the encounter, — unfavorable to 
Bothwell, — Dunbar was surrendered to his enemies. Before the 
beginning of August, Bothwell's pursuers had not started. Kirkakly 
was present at Lochleven at the time of the Queen's Abdication, 24th 
July, 1567. It was not determined in the Privy Council at Dunbar, 
at which Morton presided, until after 31st July to dispatch Tullibar- 
diue and Kirkakly in pursuit of Bothwell. Indeed, the commission 
issued to them is of the lUh August: "To pursue the Earl and his 
accomplices by sea or land, with fire, sword, and all kind of hostility, 
and fence and hold courts of justice wheresoever they shall think 
good." The Bishop of Orkney, Adam Bothwell, the same who had 
performed Bothwell's marriage with Mary, and who was one of the 
Lords of Session [i.e., Judges of the Supreme Court of Scotland), 
accompanied them. His co-operation was simply, perhaps, for the 
})urpose of having a high judicial officer ready at hand to try and 
sentence and execute the outlawed Earl if he fell into the hands of 
his perfidious enemies. 

Two engagements took place by Bressesund and by Ounst in Shet- 
land. At the first place Bothwell's men were ashore. They cut the 
cables and proceeded to Ounst. Here, however, only one, not two, of 
Bothwell's ships were taken, and Tallow, Hepburn, Dalgleish, and 
others were captured, and at a later period executed. But the principal 
vessel, with a smaller one, escaped by reason of Kirkaldy's ship run- 
ning on a sand-bank and remaining stuck fast thereon. 

This brings this narrative to the ever hitherto befogged story of 
Bothwell's sojourn in Norway and Denmark. He was there arrested, 
NOT, however, for 'piracy, but for want of credentials. The whole his- 



52 JA3IES HEPBURN, 

tory of this affair — which nevertlieless even Mignet repeats — is clear 
ill-natured fable. Buchanan liimself does not put it in his history, but 
in his famous " Dcfcdlo.'' The whole story is utterly false. Bothwell 
did not attack a ship; the Norwegians did not come to the rescue; he 
was not accused of being a pirate; not one of his companions was 
indicted and executed. The record of the official trial expressly men- 
tions that Christian Olborrig, Captain of the Danish ship of Avar 
" Bjornen," had detained two merchant vessels {Finken, Pinks) because 
they had no sort of credential papers aboard. There is nothing in the 
proceedings about " piracy." 

What is more and more important to the truth, Bothwell was not 
at first held as a prisoner. Erick Bosenkrantz, Commandant of Bergen, 
allowed him at his request to lodge at a hotel or tavern, and enter- 
tained him nobly and elegantly in the castle. He was virtually free. 
As he was in a very destitute condition, he looked out on going 
ashore for suitable clotliing for himself and for his people. The Lady 
Anne, daughter of one Christopher Thrumidsen, provided it, and her 
he paid with the smaller of his two vessels (Pinks). The larger he 
said was (as has been hereinbefore mentioned) hired Bremen prop- 
erty, and since some doubted this, he left the vessel at Bergen. Bear 
in mind it is not Bothwell who states all this, but the Court and the 
sworn Referees of Bergen to their King, Frederic II. On this account 
the ships were not confiscated, but left at Bothwell's disposal, the best 
of proof, if any more were required, that he had not been and was not 
detained as a " pirate." 

Soon after this Bothwell turns up in Copenhagen, apparently at 
liberty, yet possibly always under some degree of supervision. On the 
12th November, 1567, he writes thence to Charles IX. of France that 
he had spoken to the French ambassador Danzay, and that he desired 
to go to France. In this letter he commends himself to that monarch's 
Jdndness by recalling his ever-faithful services as Oiamberlain and Cap- 
tain of the Scottish Guards. The letter aj>j)ears to be written under no 
feeling of anxiety, and he does not even ask for mediation in favor of 
his being set free, and was, therefore, at liberty. 

It is evident and naturally so that the Scottish government was ex- 
ceedingly desirous of the extradition of Bothwell, whom they had with 
amusing haste declared before the Parliament, 20th December, 1567, 
guilty of high treason, — that is, before the same Parliament which in 
April of the same year with equal inconsistency had declared him guilt- 
less; and it is clearly evident that the Scotch authorities were supported in 
their demand by Elizabeth, the protectress of (her "Spaniel") Murray. 
Nevertheless, these requisitions met with no success. In the first place, 
because King Frederic received no guaranty that the trial of Both- 
well — before judges composed of his own actual accomplices in the 
crimes to be considered — would be conducted in an impartial manner; 



EARL OF BOTHWELL. 53 

and, in the second place, becanse the King himself was not persuaded 
of Bothwell's guilt, the more so in that the Earl was accused only in 
connection with Mary, who appeared to the King to be innocent. The 
negotiations in respect to Bothwell's extradition become clear enough 
from numerous documents which were exchanged on the subject, and 
which are preserved in the Royal Danish Archives. A portion of these 
have been printed. They only reveal, however, in a measure, par- 
tially clear ideas when they are gone through carefully in chronological 
order. 

Even before the 30th September, when Murray, as Regent, wrote 
to King Frederic II., in the name of James VI., from Stirling, con- 
cerning Bothwell's extradition, Captain John Clark is said to have been 
sent as Envoy to Denmark to obtain either Bothwell's head or person. 
At all events, the letter of James VI. (Murray's) to Frederic II. 
treats of this, together with Clark's instructions of 25th August, 1568.^" 
Schiern's date, 1567, must be an error, and the year instead be 1568. 

" In order to comprehend the action of Frederic II. of Denmark (born 1534, 

succeeded to the crown 4th April, 1558, in regard to Bothwell), it is necessary to 

investigate the character of that king. According to his portrait in Fredericksborg 

" he looks the very pattern of decorum, although his face, red and putty, tells of 

strong liquor." Indeed " Anders Bedel, the parson, in his funeral sermon declared 

had he abstained from wine bibbing he might have now been alive and in good 

health." Perhaps he liked Bothwell because he could drink deep ; and " Scotland's 

proudest earl" is said to have drank his enemy, the Scottish envoy. Captain Clarke, 

to death in the prison-house common to both and the hitter's eminent deserts. He 

was a positive man, that is, one unusually strong in his convictions. His nobility, 

courtiers, and officials had given him so much trouble, and he had experienced such 

continued treason or treachery and annoyances of "cabals" against his authority, 

that he had " lost all faith in men and fortune ;" and was accustomed to express his 

convictions in two ejaculations, the first, " My hope is in God alone," inscribed 

upon his tomb in the Cathedral at Fioeskilde, which he so greatly beautified and 

endowed, and the second, " Faithful (or Trustworthy) is Wildpret or Wildbratt," 

his favorite hound, who " bit everybody but his royal master," to whom he always 

resorted for comfort in trouble. This second proverb, commonly written T. I. W. B., 

is still perpetuated in many places in Zealand, among others the carpets in the Castle 

of Fredericksborg, where this dog is represented with these letters on his collar. It 

is said that by the conjoined exclamations " My trust is in God alone," " Faithful 

is Wildpret," Frederic meant to signify that except in God and in the brute 

creation, the highest and the lowest, he had found nothing living in which he could 

confide. In spite of this partial misanthropy, he was a liberal prince, honest and pious, 

although straightlaced, if not bigoted to some degree in his views of religion. He 

was a zealous Protestant, but a strict sectarian, and " would allow of no dissent, no 

Calvinistic tendencies ; the Lutheran was the recognized religion of the land, and 

that people must hold to or nothing." He published a book of extracts from the 

Psalms, the Proverbs, and the common-sense teachings of Jesus, the son of Sirach, 

and had the Bible translated into the Icelandic. With all this he was not fond of 

people who diflered from his views of the faith that was in him. Consequently, he 

may not have had full confidence in Bothwell on account of his loose ideas of living, 

although in one of his letters respecting the Scotch earl, 18th November, 1568, he 

designated him " Our pairticular Favorite." Whether Bothwell afterwards did 

anything to ofl'end his puritanical sense of propriety is not shown and not known ; 



54 JAMES HEPBURN, 

The King answered Murray, on the 30th of December, tliat he 
could not give Bothwell up without great injustice, since the case was 
not clear, and his guilt was not proved. He intended to bring the case 
before the next Assembly of tiie Magnates in Denmark. Meanwhile, 
he would keep a good and strict watch over him. 

Of the 13th November, 15G7, appear the Instructions of Peder Oxe, 
the Chancellor, and of John Friis, as to the conduct to be observed 
towards Bothwell. A letter of Bothwell to Frederic II. fits on to 
this. The reply of Bothwell to Peder Oxe is of 18th November, 1567. 
Under date, the 28th December, 1567, is preserved the royal command 
for the incarceration of Bothwell at Malmo. Of the same date a me- 
morial of Peder Oxe to Frederick II. and the answer to this, of 1st 
January, 1568. 

On the 5th January, 1568, Bothwell was still in Copenhagen, but 
at this date imprisoned ; because he, himself, mentions " The contu- 
melies and indignities that I endure in this prison," whence he ad- 

but as Bothwell was very impulsive, although it is intimated that 16th June, 
1573, there occurred for the first time a radical change in his treatment of Both- 
well, and then his real strict captivity began, nothing is more probable than that 
Bothwell's fiery nature incited him to revolt against the injustice and constraint to 
which he was subjected, and kings do not like the truth or outspoken sentiments 
contrary to their own. 

It may be that love — -which interferes with the lives of most men and renders 
them happy or the reverse, love which did not run smoothly — had a great deal to do 
with making Frederic what he was, and the usual antidote to such poison is wine. 
" Frederic II. was, when we consider the age he lived in, a right-minded, honorable 
man. In early life he was much attached to a young and beautiful girl, Dagmar 
Hardenberg by name, who, though of noble birth, belonged to no princely house ; 
make her his queen he could not, and he was too high-principled to take advantage 
of her youth, so he remained a bachelor until he was thirty-eight years of age, when, 
yielding to the entreaties of his advisers, he, much against his will, contracted an 
alliance with the Princess Sophia of Mecklenburg. Tradition relates how Dagmar 
was present at the coronation of the queen, which took place in the Frue Kirke of 
Copenhagen, but, overcome bj' her feelings, fainted away, was carried out of the 
church, and died shortly after broken-hearted. Two daughters were the produce 
of Frederic's marriage, and, in despair at the non-arrival of an heir to the crown, 
he began to regret he had yielded to the desire of his nobles." 

Petrick assures his readers that the last four years of Bothwell's life are a blank. 
Consequently, everything in regard to them is speculation, except it is averred that, 
even after he was committed to the Castle of .Dragsholm, he " nevertheless got per- 
mission to go a hunting," 383, 1. Undoubtedly, however, as Schicrn quotes from a 
letter of the French Ambassador Dancej', 28th June, 1573, " Up to this time the 
King of Denmark had treated the Earl of Bothwell kindly enough, but within a 
few days he has had him transferred to a very evil and close prison." 

It may be interesting to know tliat Frederic II. was patron of many learned 
men, and among these Tycho Brahe, the celebrated astronomer, to whom he com- 
mitted the sculptural adornment of the Royal Mausoleum at Roeskilde, and he pro- 
tected Melancthon and other German Reformers. He it was rebuilt Kronborg, the 
famous castle near Elsmere, so well known to the admirers — and who are not? — 
of Hamlet. It is said, " Had Shakespeare searched the world round he never could 
have selected so fitting a locality for the ghost scene as the ramparts of Kronborg." 



JSARL OF BOTHWELL. 55 

dressed his first Memorial to the Danish King, and defends himself 
with great skill, even against the accusation as to the murder of 
Darnley. 

This the Bannatyne Club in Edinburgh, 1828, published from a 
copy which Bothwell gave to tlie French ambassador, Danzay, and 
which is ke])t in the library of the Royal Castle of Drothinghohn, in 
Sweden. LabanofF used a copy, whicli is preserved by the family of 
d'Esneval, and which is accompanied with some remarks by Bothwell. 
This second exemplar was, perhaps, sent through Danzay to Charles 
IX. of France. 

On the 29th March, 1568, Westminster, Elizabeth wrote to Fred- 
eric II., "Commissioners will arrive from Scotland in order to extra- 
dite Bothwell;" indorsed, "Received on the 21st April." The 
original, in the Royal Archives, is not printed. 

On the 4th May, 1568, Elizabeth urges Frederic II. afresh and 
pretty energetically to consent to the extradition. On the 16th July, 
1568, James VI. wrote to Frederic II. in regard to the approaching 
mission of Clark in regard to Bothwell. By this time Frederic ap- 
pears to have become somewhat uncertain and desirous of obtaining 
external authority or advice for his action, since he invites, under date 
9th August, 1568, different German })rinces to furnish their opinions 
as regards the extradition. The answers of the German princes came 
in under the 25th, 27th August, 1st, 11th, 19th September. 

Another letter of James VI. (by Murray), of the 28th August, 

1568, was dispatched to Frederic II., written on the occasion of the 
departure of Axel Wiffert. Clark's mission was not altogether without 
result. On the 30th October, 1568, he gave a certificate of the receipt 
of Nicholas Howbert (Hubert), called " French Paris," and of William 
Murray, both accused of the murder of Darnley. The first was gen- 
tleman in waiting to Bothwell, afterwards to Mary. His examinations 
and declarations under date of ,9th, 10th of August, 1569, in St. An- 
drews have been often printed, but they seem to have been tampered 
with. Hubert was executed (judicially murdered) on the 15th August, 

1569. Of the fate of William Murray nothing is heard. 

After Clark's departure, Bothwell's situation seems to have been 
improved, 1569 ; and no demand made for him. He was placed on a 
respectable footing. Of date 2d March, 1569, appears an official entry 
regarding " velvet and silk for Bothwell." 

According to Chalmers, Bothwell gave in this year a letter and 
plenary commission (irrevocable power of attorney ?) to Lord Boyd 
to declare his assent to a divorce from Mary Stuart. This letter was 
accessible until 1746, among the family papers of the descendants of 
Lord Boyd. About this time the Regent Murray was assassinated in 
Scotland, 23d January, 1570. The Earl of Lenox, father of Darnley, 
was then elevated to the office of Regent of Scotland on the 12th July, 



56 JAMES HEPBURN, 

1570, and at once fresli demands were again made for the extradition 
of Both well. 

Under date of 17 July, James VI. (by Lenox) writes to Frederic 
II., and begs liini by no means to free Bothwell out of respect to those 
who desire to represent the Earl as innocent. This was received in 
Copenhagen 7th August. The letter of Peder Oxe and Johan Friis 
to Frederic II. of 22d June, 1570, and Frederic's answer of 24th 
June, 1570, appear to treat of this advice. Elizabeth joined in the 
request of Lenox, 3d August, 1570, and as Clark, who had been sent 
out, was represented as being a disreputable person by Bothwell, the 
English Queen became responsible for his honor. To the same pur- 
pose, August, 1570, James VI. (by Lenox) addressed himself to Fred- 
eric II. Nevertheless, as Clark was not deemed reputable, his ser- 
vices appear to be considered useless, and, in December of the same 
year, a special ambassador from Scotland was sent out, — Thomas Bu- 
chanan ; not the Historical writer, but his nephew. He, on the 14th 
December, in a long Latin address, handed in in manuscript on the 
16th December, asks the King, Frederic, for a final extradition of Both- 
well, and under the 31st December, concisely begs the Danish monarch 
for an answer. The original, not printed, is in the Royal Danish 
Archives. 

Under date 9th March, 1570, the momentous reply of Frederic 
to Thomas Buchanan, as regards the demand that Bothwell should 
either be executed in Denmark or extradited to Scotland, the King 
answers that Bothwell's guilt is not dear, since the captive Earl de- 
nies participation in the crime of which he is accused ; setting forth that 
he has already been once pronounced innocent in Scotland ; and de- 
manding that at proper time he may have judicial trial by battle, or 
else a new legal trial either in Denmark or in Scotland, where the im- 
partiality of the judges can be guaranteed. It is undeniable that Both- 
well's demands are as just as they are clear, and they afford decisive 
proofs of sense and courage. He likewise requires the same guaranty, 
together with other safeguards (political), that the extradition shall 
create no precedent, before he (himself) will consent to a surrender. 
He desires an answer before the 24th August. Clark, sent out to ob- 
tain Bothwell's extradition, was now, for his own acts, justly incar- 
cerated, and died in the Danish prison that held his intended victim. 

Buchanan, the Scottish envoy, received this letter on the 12th 
March, and answered it on the 19th. He at once accepted the pro- 
posals, and wished that Frederic II. would himself formulate the 
guaranty, and recounts once more the crimes of which Bothwell was 
accused, among them the abduction of the innocent Queen. Take 
notice that the same parties who were actively protesting her innocence 
in Denmark, accused her in England of participation in the murder of 
Darnley by Bothwell, and of being an accessory to her own abduction 



EARL OF nOTHWELL. bl 

by the latter. Budianan states he demaiuls Botliwell's delivery for 
trial, " Because he had jinblicly used force with the Queen, . . . that 
most potent Princess, richly endowed by God with the highest gifts, 
to be regarded among the chief of princes on account of her peculiar 
virtues and rarest endowments both of body and of mind." He, Both- 
well, "" this natural monster," is said to have enticed [or deluded] her 
"by fascinations, filtres, incantations, and sorcery, with other evil 
arts." 

In this way the extradition was virtually decided on, and Elizab(>th 
did not need, under date of 22d March, 1570, to address a fresh epistle 
to Frederic II. in which she demands that Bothwell be sent to England. 
But the guarantees to be demanded were not so easily defined in a way 
to content the cautious and honorable King of Denmark, and the friends 
of Mary Stuart employed every means to hinder this. The extradition 
was (o take place on the 24th August, Danzay had consented, but La 
Mothe Fenelon, French Ambassador of Charles IX. in London, con- 
jured his master under date of 20th June, 1571, most earnestly not to 
permit this to be done. King Charles IX. appears to have concurred 
with his Representative and to have given Danzay such instructions as 
delayed the datigerous crisis. The letters of Danzay to Charles IX. and 
Catharine de Medici of 2d April, 15th July, and 1st September, 1571, 
are filled with the subject. James VL (by Lenox, under date of 5th 
July, received 31st July) urges Frederic IL afresh to fulfill his promise. 
The original is ju-iiited in the Royal Danish Archives. The thunder- 
storm was gathering dangerously over Both well's head, but proper 
guarantees — for verbal promises amounted to nothing — were not fur- 
nished, and the King does not seem to have once again asked for thera. 
Then suddenly — all is silent! — a great gap of four years occurs: the 
extradition did not take place. For what reason? 

On the 4th September, 1571, a fresh murder took place in Scot- 
land. " Lenox, the Regent, was killed by [the chivalric (s/'c)] Kirkaldy 
of Grange, Huntley, and others." Great discords followed. The Earl 
of INlar became Regent, and had enough upon his hands at home to 
prevent his troubling himself about the unfortunate Bothwell. Mar's 
uprightness — acknowledged by all parties — did not avail to save him. 
He died [by poison (?) suspected] 29th October, 1572. To him as 
Regent succeeded the most dangerous man in Scotland, the Earl of 
Morton; he, who was an accomplice in the murder of the King 
(Darnley), the best of proofs that the general hatred against Bothwell 
was grounded on other and more ignoble motives than a desire for 
justice. Bothwell now had rest from his enemies. A single letter of 
James VI. , 1575, reminds Frederic IL, merely incidentally, of these 
negotiations. The King nuist have understood that a guaranty for a 
just examination of the ca-se in Scotland was out of the question at this 
time, and have i-ecognized that the accusations against Bothwell were at 

(i 



68 JAMES HEPBURN, 

least partially calumnious. Notwithstanding — why is incomprehensi- 
ble — Bothwell did not obtain his liberty. 

Over and above all these false charges Bothwell is said to have been 
accused of tiie abduc^tion of different respectable young ladies. There 
is nothing of the sort contained in the Danish Archives, and for this he 
could have been impeached only in Denmark, Thus the latter charges 
are decidedly false. 

Almost all maintain that Bothwell lost his senses in the prison. If 
such had been the case it would not have been wonderful ; indeed, if 
true, it would present a proof of his active spirit and original nobility 
of soul. That he became subject to melancholy from such a startling 
change of fortune and from regret is not unlikely, but truth compels 
the decision that even this statement is not proved. 

Next in order comes the consideration of the existence of a Testa- 
tament [or Will, so styled] of Bothwell, a statement which he is said 
to have made upon his death-bed. Teulet printed it in French and in 
English. The former was at first published by Keith after a copy con- 
temporary (with the original) in the Scottish College at Paris, which is 
now lost; the latter after a contemporary copy. Teulet considers them 
false, — founded on very weak grounds. I^banoff [)roves that a Testa- 
ment really did exist. A letter of Foster to Walsingham, 15th June, 
1581, gives evidence of it. In any case the Testament was used against 
Morton, when, in 1584, he was proved guilty of the murder of Darn- 
ley, and for this, as well as many other misdeeds, was executed. It 
was forwarded by King Frederic II. to Queen Elizabeth, but not 
made public by her, and its contents kept from the knowledge of Mary. 
At the same time, although Petrick believes that something of the kind 
did exist, the careful Doctor is compelled to pronounce the testimony 
brought forward by Teulet to be spurious, especially so, since the two 
pretended co])ies of it do not exactly agree. The Parisian version 
makes the " Paris Bra we von Schloss Vescut" [Brahe of Vidskovle, 
a chateau near Christianstad, now in Sweden] to be present; the Eng- 
lish does not. The French version includes a greater number among 
the murderers of Darnley than the English. According to the latter, 
Bothwell cannot recollect all. In other respects they disagree in many 
points. But of more importance are completely false staten)ents of 
facts. The Confession declares that my Lord Robert, Prior of Holy- 
rood, Earl of Orkney, was among the murderers. He, however, was 
j)recisely the one who warned Darnley. For the same reason Craw- 
ford could not have been present, sin<re he was a jealous partisan and 
friend of Darnley. Bothwell knew this iK'rfectly well, and would not 
have stultified himself with such errors or inventions. 

That Bothwell should represent himself as practicing sorcery is 
scarcely credible. He is said to have confessed to having abducted 
divers ladies from France, England, Denmaik, and Germany. This is 



EARL OF BOTH WELL. 69 

incredible. If lie had done so they must luive turned up somewhere, 
and certainly it would have been brougiit against him and Mary. His 
enemies iiad not so much delicacy as to be silent respecting such a 
charge if true. As far as Denmark is concerned, it is manifestly dis- 
proved. Again, it cannot be believed that he ever abducted two sisters 
at one time; that he "has deceived tway (two) of the Burgomaster's 
daughters of Lubeck with many others." A Burgomaster of Lubeck, 
in those times, was not the man to go unrevenged and sit down 
quietly witiiout making proper reclamation and compelling some wild 
kind of justice most satisfying and satisfactory to himself. 

More weighty, however, than even these improbabilities presents 
themselves in that the writings are dated from Malmo," and almost all 
later (even the best) authors agree to make Bothwell die in Malm5, 
1577 or 1576. Bothwell, however, died in Dragsholm, a solitary 
castle on a tongue of land in Northwest Zeeland, in the beginning of 
November, 1575. 

When he was transjiorted to the prison in Dragsholm has not been 
ascertained, although it was probably after Frederic II. — subsequent 
to the end of the year 1571 — had made up his mind not to surrender 
him. And, although the tower in Malmo is shown as the place where 
Bothwell died, this is only another instance of how little even the 
natives have been instructed on the subject or know about it. 

Such was the end — dark and almost mythical — of a man who, for 
a time, controlled the fate of Scotland, and who, as the third husband 
of the most beautiful (so esteemed) Queen, — when once he dragged her 
along with him down the precipitous pathway of his (or their 
mutual) passions, — exerted a most fatally decisive influence over her. 
Such was the end of the man who just came short of winning the 
Crown, and who, not altogether unjustly, })aid penance for his rapid rise 
by a more rapid fall. He is one of the most noteworthy and instruc- 
tive personalities in history, and his career is especially impressive — 
purely tragic — by reason of the close connection of guilt, greatness, 
daring, and downfall. A change of fortune could in no instance have 
occurred more quickly and decidedly than in his case, and he must 
bear the full responsibility of his deeds. These his best friends do not 
wish to excuse where they do not merit excuse. His great political 
faults were a want of mistrust in believing that his enemies were 
ca|)al)le of such infernal hypocrisy and mutual change of mind or 
treachery, and a credulity through which he allowed himself to be 

" Malmo, formerly a place of strength, then belonging to Denmark, now in 
Sweden, on the eastern shore of the Sound {Ore Sund) nearly opposite and east- 
southeast of Copenhagen, but sixteen miles distant. Dragsholm (Draxholm) is in an 
entirely difterent direction. It is on the same island with Copenhagen, but fifty 
miles at least to the west by north. To confound the two places is cither the result 
of utter ignorance or else of intentional misrepresentation. 



60 JA3IES HEPBURN, EAUL OF BOTH WELL. 

used by these traitors as a tool even a<i;ainst himself, and a moral and 
tragi(! guilt, — by which lie was led to conceive that by a murder lie 
Avould be able to bring about an improvement of affairs, however much 
this may have been needed, in his native country. Conceding all this, 
when, afterwards, ignorance and malicious falsehood seek to distort his 
memory beyond recognition, the real facts of his unhappy life deserve so 
much the more to be brought prominently forward and demonstrated 
with clearness in the light of truth. It is undeniable that he had 
brilliant qualities, mental and physical ; that he possessed an open, liberal 
nature ; that he was of unchangeable fidelity, high-hearted and generous. 
He was not, it is true, without the frivolous characteristics of the 
French and the wilder nature or disposition of a Scotchman of his 
time; pomp-loving and prodigal; a child of civil war; brave and 
ready to light, yet only inclined for open and violent action, not 
cunning or underhand dealing. He does not rise above his time, but 
he looms up as one of the most powerful in it, a born master-spirit, 
whose tragical position lies in that it stirred him up to take by force 
what seemed to be or was eventually denied him by Fate, and in that 
he thought by a crime — which can be proved to have been the only one 
of his life — to restore peace to his deeply disturbed country. He is a 
speaking proof that even to the greatest such a deed of violence can 
eventuate only for evil. In any event, he is worthy of a far better 
remembrance in history than that which is allowed to him. The 
verdict against him is utterly baseless, although up to this very day 
calunmies, repeated with virulence and anxious care, have been allowed 
to distort and conceal the facts in regard to him. That bitter wrong 
has been done to James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, can be shown 
from original authorities hitherto disregarded or kept out of sight, and 
whoever has read with care this vindication of the brave Earl must be 
convinced that amid the black flock of ravenous Scottish nobility in 
the sixteenth century, he appears, as Dr. Petrick observes, like that 
rara avis, a White Orow. 

In conclusion, the verse (13) of Psalm Ixviii. might justly, in 
many respects, be a])plied to the third husband of JNIary Stuart, that 
" Though ye have lain among the pots," or, as the Walloon Commen- 
tator, Martin, translates it, " amid cinders and refuse, — the aristocratic 
generation among and with whom he had to act, — ye shall be [or 
appear] as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers of 
yellow gold." 



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